The Case for High Confidence
My grandmother died on a Tuesday afternoon in late October. She had been in hospice for about a week. The cancer had moved from her lungs to her bones, and then into places the oncologist stopped bothering to name. For the last two days, she mostly slept. When she was awake, her mind would drift. She would sometimes ask for her mother, who had been dead for thirty years. My aunt gently explained, each time, that Grandma's mother had gone on before her. Grandma would nod and close her eyes. Then, on that last Tuesday, something shifted.
She had not opened her eyes since morning. But around two o'clock, without warning, she sat partly up in the bed and fixed her gaze on the corner of the room, near the ceiling. Her face changed. For the first time in days, she was not in pain, not confused, not struggling. She looked as if she were seeing something astonishing — something she had been waiting her whole life to see. She said, very clearly, "Oh." Just that one word. Then she reached up her hand, smiled, and said, "He's here." My aunt asked her who was there. Grandma whispered, "Jesus. My Jesus." She held her hand up toward the corner of the room for perhaps thirty seconds, still smiling. Then she lay back down. She died a little over an hour later.
I tell this story because I have told it many times, and every Christian I have ever told it to has the same reaction. They do not ask me for discernment criteria. They do not ask whether it was the pain medication, whether the family might have misremembered, whether the cultural expectation of seeing Jesus shaped the report. They simply nod, and their eyes fill a little, and they tell me about their own grandmother, or their own father, or a patient they sat with in the ICU. They know this phenomenon. They trust it. And I think they are right to.
I want to begin this chapter by honoring that instinct. After eleven chapters in which I have been carefully training the reader in the discipline of testing spiritual claims against Scripture — after walking through warnings, categories of error, and specific criteria for evaluating near-death experiences — I want now to pause and say: for deathbed experiences specifically, the Christian's default of warm trust is not naive. It is not a failure of careful thinking. It is, in fact, tracking something real about the DBE phenomenon itself — something that makes DBEs categorically different from their more complicated NDE cousins. The whole point of this chapter is to explain why.
The last chapter gave the reader positive indicators for evaluating near-death experiences — markers that lean toward a given NDE being genuine. Those criteria exist because they are needed. The NDE landscape includes a meaningful percentage of problematic accounts, and even the genuine ones can be corrupted by bad interpretation, syncretistic framing, or career incentives that creep in long after the event itself.1 An NDE reported by a person who later built a ministry on the experience is not automatically suspect, but it does call for careful evaluation before trust is given.
Deathbed experiences are different. Not totally different — the phenomena are related, and some of the same spiritual realities underlie both. But structurally, socially, and theologically, DBEs live in a different category. My working position, which I will defend throughout this chapter, is that approximately ninety-five percent of reported DBEs are genuine spiritual experiences. That is not a precise figure, and I am not claiming to have counted every DBE ever reported to arrive at the number. It is a working estimate that captures the reality I see in the professional literature and in the pastoral experience of countless Christian ministers, hospice workers, and grieving families.2
The practical result is that Christians should approach DBEs with a warm and trusting default. When your dying grandmother sees angels at the foot of her bed, you do not need to run her experience through an elaborate seven-point checklist before you receive it as a gift from God. You can simply receive it. You can sit with her, hold her hand, and thank the Lord for meeting her at the threshold. This chapter explains why that posture is the right one, and also where the rare exceptions lie.
Of all DBEs reported in reputable medical, hospice, and pastoral settings, roughly 95% appear to be genuine spiritual experiences. This is not a rigid figure but a working estimate that reflects the phenomenon as it is actually reported. The concerns that apply to a meaningful minority of NDEs — career incentive, community shaping, interpretive drift — mostly do not apply to DBEs, because the DBE occurs in a context that resists most of those corruption mechanisms.
This chapter builds its case in three movements. First, I will walk through ten structural reasons why DBEs warrant high confidence. Second, I will address the small minority of DBE-like events that do require more careful discernment — the five-percent category. Third, I will offer case studies and a pastoral guide for Christians who find themselves at a dying loved one's bedside. My hope is that by the end of the chapter, the reader who has been trained all through this book to test the spirits will also be trained to know when discernment has done its work and warm reception is what the moment calls for.
Ten reasons, considered together, make the case. I will take them one at a time. Each reason on its own is suggestive. Taken as a cumulative case, they are hard to explain away.
The typical NDE reported in the popular literature includes an out-of-body experience, a tunnel, a light, a life review, encounters with deceased loved ones, encounters with a luminous being, sometimes a heavenly landscape, sometimes extended theological dialogue, sometimes messages for the experiencer to bring back, and a return to the body. It is a rich, complex, multi-layered phenomenon. Complexity is not in itself a problem — Scripture itself describes complex visionary experiences, from Ezekiel's wheels within wheels to John's sea of glass mingled with fire. But complexity means more surface area for things to go wrong. More elements means more places where the experiencer's pre-existing framework, the influence of subsequent teachers, or occasional demonic interference can distort the content.
DBEs, by contrast, are usually very simple. The dying person perceives a small set of elements: a deceased loved one, an angel, Jesus, a beautiful place, a comforting light, peace. They speak to someone the witnesses cannot see. They sometimes reach upward. They smile. They seem unafraid. Often the whole event unfolds in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds, with only a few spoken sentences.3 The dying person does not sit down for a lengthy theological conversation with a being of light, nor receive detailed messages about the structure of the afterlife. There is simply not enough content in a typical DBE for much to go wrong.
This is a point worth pausing on. If I were a deceiver trying to plant a false message in the mind of a dying grandmother, I would need her to stay conscious long enough to receive the message, understand it, and communicate it. Most DBEs give no such window. The dying person sees what they see, says one or two things to the people in the room, and then either dies or falls back into the dying process. The structural simplicity of DBEs is one of their great protections against corruption.
Another way to put this: the attack surface is small. In software security, an "attack surface" is the sum of all the places where an attacker can try to get in. Systems with small attack surfaces are harder to compromise than systems with large ones. In theological terms, an experience with many elements has many points at which something can be introduced, misperceived, or distorted. An experience with few elements has few such points. The typical DBE is, by this measure, one of the hardest spiritual experiences to corrupt. There is simply not enough there to work with.
I do not want to overstate this. Simplicity does not guarantee authenticity — a simple hallucination is still a hallucination. But simplicity means that when we do try to evaluate the content, the evaluation is straightforward. The grandmother says she saw her husband and Jesus. We do not have to process pages of alleged theological teaching. We have two perceptions to consider, both of which fit seamlessly into the biblical picture of the intermediate state. There is not much to test because there is not much there to potentially be false.
An NDE happens inside the experiencer. Others in the room may see a flat-lined heart monitor or a body on a gurney, but they cannot observe the experience itself. After the experiencer recovers, we have only their word for what happened. This does not mean NDEs are untrustworthy — most are — but it does mean that verification depends entirely on the experiencer's honest report.
DBEs are different in a crucial way. While witnesses cannot see the content of what the dying person perceives, they can and regularly do observe the behavior associated with it. They see the dying patient fix her eyes on a specific point in the room. They see her smile, or weep, or reach upward. They hear her address deceased relatives by name. They watch her speak to an unseen presence using the kind of tone one uses when speaking to someone genuinely there. Sometimes they hear the patient say remarkable things, like the name of a relative she did not know had died, or the date she will pass, or a description of heavenly beauty.4
Witnessed behavior is not the same as witnessed content, but it is significant evidence nonetheless. When my grandmother sat up and said, "Jesus, my Jesus," my aunt and I could not see Him. But we could both see her — see the shift in her face, hear the clarity in her voice, observe the reach of her hand. Two of us saw the same behavior at the same time. Hospice nurses report the same kinds of behavior across decades of practice and across thousands of patients. This shared observation lends the phenomenon a kind of evidential weight that pure first-person testimony cannot have.
There is also a smaller but fascinating subset of DBE-related phenomena called "shared-death experiences," in which someone other than the dying person — a spouse, a child, a hospice worker — reports perceiving something of the dying person's experience themselves. A daughter at her father's bedside who feels herself briefly lifted alongside him. A son who perceives a light filling the room. A hospice nurse who senses an unseen presence in the moments before death. These accounts are rarer and less well-studied than standard DBEs, but they exist across cultures and traditions, and they point in the same direction: the event we are observing is not merely happening inside one person's brain. Something larger is taking place.
I do not build the central case of this chapter on shared-death experiences. They are rare enough that they function as confirming evidence rather than primary evidence. But they are worth noting because they reinforce the basic point: DBEs exist at the intersection of the dying person's perception and the shared space in which they die. Witnesses matter. And witnessed DBE behavior — even without witnessed DBE content — is part of what gives the phenomenon its evidential weight.
Sir William Barrett, the celebrated Irish physicist, first became interested in deathbed phenomena when his physician wife Lacy came home from the hospital in January 1924 deeply moved by a dying patient named Doris. Doris had just given birth and was dying of complications. In her final minutes, Doris reported seeing her father, and then said with surprise that her sister Vida was there too. Vida had died three weeks earlier, but the family had deliberately kept the news from Doris because of her fragile condition. Doris herself did not know Vida was dead. Her husband and the attending physician did — and they watched her describe seeing someone they knew was on the other side. Barrett spent the rest of his life investigating similar cases.5
One concern I have raised throughout this book about a subset of NDE reports is career incentive. A person who had an NDE years ago, who has since written books, made YouTube videos, spoken at conferences, and built a following, has subtle pressures working on their memory. What sells? What plays well to the audience? What distinguishes their account from the competing accounts? Without anyone acting in bad faith, the account can drift. Features get added, emphasized, or softened over time in ways the experiencer does not consciously notice. This is simply how human memory and social shaping work.6
None of this applies to the person having a DBE. Most DBErs die within hours or days — sometimes within minutes — of reporting the experience. They will not write a book. They will not tour the NDE conference circuit. They will not get a reality show. They have no audience to play to, no competing accounts to distinguish themselves from, no financial or reputational stake in what they say. Their report is made to family members, often gasping for breath, in real time, with no apparent motive beyond honest communication of what they are seeing.7
I find this point especially important. Much of the secular skepticism aimed at NDE accounts — that they are shaped by publishing demands, that the experiencer has reasons to embellish, that later accounts diverge from earlier ones — simply cannot apply to a phenomenon where the reporter dies an hour later. Whatever else the dying grandmother is doing when she says, "I see Jesus," she is not doing marketing. The motive to invent is absent. When it comes to human testimony, absence of motive to deceive is one of the most underrated evidential markers we have.
If DBEs were culturally constructed — if they were simply the dying brain's way of generating imagery consistent with whatever religion the dying person grew up with — then we would expect radically different content from culture to culture and century to century. Medieval Catholic peasants would report different things than modern Protestant Americans, who would report different things than Hindu Indians, who would report different things than secular Britons. The phenomenon would not be a single phenomenon but a hundred different phenomena, each tied to its local religious imagination.
That is not what the research shows. The core features of DBEs are strikingly consistent across every time and culture for which we have records.8 Sir William Barrett's 1926 collection documented the same core features — a sense of peace, perception of deceased relatives, perception of light and beauty, words spoken to the unseen — that Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson independently confirmed in their landmark 1977 cross-cultural study of American and Indian hospitals.9 The same features appear in Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick's modern British hospice research, in Christopher Kerr's long-term study of patients in Buffalo-area hospice care, and in J. Steve Miller's multicultural examination of the DBE literature for his doctoral dissertation.10
Within-culture coherence accompanies cross-cultural consistency. Christians tend to see Jesus. Jews sometimes report figures associated with their own tradition. Hindus sometimes see Yamdoots (messengers associated with the Hindu god of death). And universally, people see their own deceased family members rather than random unknown figures.11 If DBEs were random brain-generated hallucinations, we would expect random content. We do not get that. What we get looks exactly like what we would expect if a real afterlife were being perceived, with the spiritual beings encountered being either the dying person's own loved ones or figures whom that person could reasonably recognize.
The Osis and Haraldsson study deserves a longer look because of how important it has been in the field. Working in the 1960s and 1970s, these two researchers — one from the United States, one from Iceland — designed a cross-cultural survey to test whether DBE content was a product of culture or pointed to a shared reality. They interviewed hundreds of doctors and nurses in hospitals in both the United States and India, asking detailed questions about what they had observed in dying patients. Their hypothesis was that if DBEs were culturally generated, American and Indian patients should report very different experiences, because American and Indian cultures have very different afterlife beliefs. What they found surprised them. The core DBE pattern was remarkably consistent across both cultures. American Christians saw angels and heavenly scenery; Indian Hindus also reported seeing figures they took to be divine messengers. Both groups reported peace, readiness, and visions of deceased loved ones. The cultural wrapping of the vision differed, but the underlying structure of the phenomenon was stable.
This finding is exactly what we would expect if there is a real afterlife that real dying people really perceive, and if the perceiving human minds — shaped by their cultures — clothe the perception in locally available categories. A real mountain looks like a mountain whether an American or an Indian hiker is looking at it, even though the language each uses to describe it will differ. A real afterlife, perceived by dying minds across cultures, will likewise produce cross-cultural consistency in the underlying content. That is what Osis and Haraldsson found. That is what every subsequent DBE study has confirmed. And that is strong evidence against the culturally-generated-hallucination hypothesis.
A small but significant percentage of DBE reports include what researchers call "Peak in Darien" experiences — named after a line in John Keats' sonnet about explorers seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time.12 In a Peak in Darien DBE, the dying person sees, on the other side, someone who they did not know had died. The Doris case I mentioned earlier is a classic example: Doris was surprised to see her sister Vida, and Vida was there because Vida had died three weeks earlier — a fact Doris did not know and could not have known.
These cases are evidentially important because they rule out, in one stroke, the most common naturalistic explanations. A brain-generated hallucination drawn from the dying person's mental contents cannot produce a vision of someone the dying person believed to be alive. A wishful-thinking projection cannot accurately report a death the projector does not know has occurred. The Peak in Darien case is a case where the content of the DBE is independently verifiable against events the dying person had no natural access to.
Bruce Greyson, the longtime University of Virginia psychiatrist and one of the most respected academic NDE researchers in the world, distinguishes three varieties of Peak in Darien experience: cases where the deceased person seen had died some time before the vision (unknown to the experiencer), cases where the deceased person seen had died at the time of the vision or immediately before, and cases where the person seen was someone the experiencer had never known in life.13 All three varieties occur. Each presents a challenge to naturalistic explanations of DBEs.
The pediatrician Melvin Morse, who studied the NDEs of children extensively, reported that in all his years collecting data, every single child who mentioned someone waiting for them on the other side named a person who had actually preceded them in death, even if only by a few moments — and the children had not been informed of these deaths.14 That statistical pattern is remarkable. If children were inventing these visions or generating them from brain activity, we would expect at least some to name living relatives, strangers, or fictional beings. Instead, they name only the already-dead, and correctly, even when the deaths are recent and unknown to them.
Terminal lucidity is the phenomenon in which patients whose brains have been deeply damaged by dementia, Alzheimer's, stroke, meningitis, or severe psychiatric illness suddenly become fully lucid in the hours before death.15 A grandmother who has not recognized her children for five years looks up, calls her daughter by name, says goodbye, and dies an hour later. A patient who has been nonverbal and bedridden speaks clearly, completely, and coherently for a brief window, sometimes accompanied by a DBE, and then passes. A schizophrenic patient who has been lost in delusion for decades recovers their mind in the final hours.
Peter Fenwick, the British neuropsychiatrist who has spent much of his career studying this phenomenon, describes it as a sudden arousal from coma, dementia, or confused mental states in which the patient recognizes family or has a visionary experience, usually lasting only minutes, just before death.16 Michael Nahm, the German biologist who has published peer-reviewed research on terminal lucidity, notes that the most astonishing cases involve patients whose brains are known to be severely damaged by disease — neurons that should not be able to produce coherent thought at all.17
This phenomenon matters for DBE discernment in two ways. First, it directly undermines the naturalistic hypothesis that DBEs are simply the product of a dying brain's random firing. If the brain is too damaged to sustain consciousness, yet consciousness suddenly returns anyway — often with coherent speech, recognition, and DBE content — then consciousness is not simply what the brain produces. Something else is going on. This is one of the strongest empirical arguments for the kind of substance dualism I defend elsewhere in this book: the view that the soul is a distinct reality from the brain and can operate independently of it.18
Second, terminal lucidity strengthens the interpretation of DBEs as genuine perceptions of a real spiritual realm. When an Alzheimer's patient who has been unable to form a sentence for years suddenly sits up, smiles, calls the name of a long-dead spouse, and dies, something is happening that a dying-brain theory cannot explain. The content of the experience — the deceased spouse, the peace, the recognition — is precisely the DBE content reported by clear-minded patients. The terminal lucidity phenomenon thus serves as independent corroboration that the DBE content itself is not a brain artifact.
A case from the research literature may help make this concrete. Noyes (1952) described a ninety-one-year-old woman who had suffered two strokes. The first stroke paralyzed her left side and impaired her speech. A second stroke left her entirely paralyzed and unable to speak. Her daughter cared for her. One day an unexpected sound from the bed caught the daughter's attention. She turned and saw her mother smiling brightly — though the woman's facial expressions had been frozen since the second stroke. The mother sat up in bed with no apparent effort, raised her arms, and spoke her deceased husband's name clearly and joyfully. Then she lay back and died.19 This account stretches every naturalistic explanation to the breaking point. A brain that cannot produce movement or speech for months somehow produces both in a final burst of coherent activity — alongside what appears to be recognition of a long-dead spouse. On a substance-dualist view of the soul, such a case is astonishing but not impossible. On a strict physicalist view, it should not happen at all. Yet these cases are reported consistently in the literature by reliable medical observers.
Dr. Michael Nahm has collected dozens of such cases from medical professionals around the world. He and Bruce Greyson found that in surveys of nursing home staff, around seventy percent of caregivers had personally witnessed terminal lucidity in patients with dementia. The phenomenon is not rare. It is widely observed and consistently under-reported, because nurses and family members often do not know there is a name for what they have seen, or assume it must have a mundane explanation.
Terminal lucidity (sometimes called "paradoxical lucidity") is the sudden return of full mental clarity in patients whose brains have been severely compromised by dementia, stroke, psychiatric illness, or traumatic injury, occurring typically in the last hours or days before death. In one nursing home survey, 70% of staff reported having personally witnessed such cases. The phenomenon is impossible to explain if the brain simply produces the mind. But it is exactly what we would expect if the soul is a distinct substance that uses the brain when available and operates with greater clarity as the body's hold on it weakens.
Throughout this book I have been honest about my concerns with a meaningful minority of NDE reports. Universalist messages — "all paths lead to the same God" — appear too often. Reincarnation themes appear occasionally. "Pre-existence of souls" language, borrowed from Mormonism or Theosophy, shows up in some accounts. Alien contact, channeled wisdom, and occult crossover appear in the more problematic ends of the NDE literature.19 Not all NDEs contain these elements, and I estimate roughly 75% lack clearly unbiblical content. But the contaminated minority is real, and the reader has to learn to spot it.
The DBE literature is strikingly different on this point. Most DBEs report content that is consistent with biblical teaching: deceased Christian loved ones are with the Lord, angels come to escort the dying, Jesus appears to His people, peace accompanies the transition to the next life. I am not aware of any significant body of DBE reports promoting reincarnation, universalism, or occult themes. The universalist, syncretistic, and New Age elements that partly contaminate the NDE literature are essentially absent from the DBE literature.20
Why is this the case? I think the answer is related to the simplicity point I made earlier. A dying grandmother who sees her mother at the foot of the bed is not receiving an extended theological download. She is just seeing her mother. There is no opportunity for a corrupting theological message to be transmitted and then reported. The content is narrow enough that it stays on the theological ground that Scripture itself covers: deceased Christians are with the Lord, angels are real, Jesus welcomes His people home.
This cleanness has a natural consequence: the discernment work required for evaluating a DBE is much lighter than the discernment work required for evaluating an NDE. You are not sifting a long theological monologue for errors. You are receiving a simple report that almost always fits within the biblical framework.
It is worth asking why the contamination rate is so much lower for DBEs than for NDEs. I think several factors combine. The dying person is not usually in a state to receive or transmit complex theological content. The experience happens too close to actual death for the dying person's subsequent beliefs and reading to shape the report retroactively. The audience is usually family rather than a public interested in exotic spirituality. No conference invitation will ever come. No book deal is possible. The social and financial pressures that can corrupt NDE reports over years of retelling simply never get a chance to operate on a DBE. Whatever the dying person said, they said it once, to the people who were there, and then they died.
There is also, I suspect, a spiritual dimension to this. The dying Christian is under the immediate care of the Lord. The enemy's opportunity to corrupt the perception is minimal — not because the enemy lacks malice, but because the dying saint is being gathered home by Christ Himself, who knows His own. I do not want to overstate this, because I cannot prove it from the research literature alone. But the theological picture Scripture gives us — of the Lord personally attending His dying people, of angels being sent to gather the saints (Luke 16:22), of the valley of the shadow of death being the very place where the Good Shepherd walks beside His sheep (Psalm 23:4) — fits naturally with the observation that the content of DBEs is theologically clean. If the Lord is there, and if He is attending to His own with specific care, the scene is not wide open for counterfeit.
Children's DBEs are, in my view, some of the most powerful evidence for the genuineness of the phenomenon as a whole. Here is why.
Young children have not yet constructed an elaborate theological worldview. A four-year-old with leukemia does not know what Swedenborgian universalism is. She does not know the pop-Christian imagery of heaven — cartoon angels with harps, golden streets — well enough to generate it in hallucination. She has not read NDE books. She has not been to NDE conferences. Whatever the grown-up world has done to muddy its imagination of the afterlife, the child's mind is relatively clean of it.21
And yet children in hospice, in pediatric oncology wards, and in emergency departments around the world report DBE content with striking clarity. Diane Komp, the Yale pediatric oncologist whose work on children's DBEs helped move her from agnostic-leaning atheism to Christian faith, describes her young patients seeing angels, hearing singing, and meeting loving presences in their last hours.22 Shaun Tabatt opens his book on the dark side of NDEs with Komp's account of a seven-year-old girl dying of leukemia who, in her final minutes, sat up in her hospital bed and told her mother about the beautiful angels she could see and hear singing.23 The girl was perhaps too young to have constructed such a vision from imagination alone. Her parents, Komp notes, felt they had been given a precious gift in their daughter's last moments.
William Barrett noticed something even more striking about children's DBEs nearly a century ago: the angels they reported often did not have wings. Barrett reasoned that if children were simply projecting their cultural expectations, they would have seen angels with wings — because that is the standard angel-image in Christmas cards, Sunday school lessons, and children's books. Instead, they reported beings they recognized as angels who had no wings at all. That detail, small as it is, is hard to explain on a "fulfilled expectations" hypothesis.24
Angela Ethier's doctoral research on pediatric death-related sensory experiences identified a consistent pattern: dying children report seeing and communicating with angels most frequently, followed by deceased family members and friends; they often know they are dying through spiritual means rather than medical explanation; they frequently appear peaceful and excited about where they are going; and they often seem to want to comfort their parents rather than be comforted.25 This is the opposite pattern from what we would expect if children's DBEs were simply projections of their fears.
Miller documents the case of a dying child who asked his father, eagerly, "Can I go now?" The father asked the child to wait for a sister to arrive. The child's response was a plaintive "Do I have to?"26 That is not the language of a frightened child confabulating a hallucination. That is the language of a child who is seeing something so good that she cannot understand why anyone would make her wait.
Hospice nurses, hospital chaplains, palliative care physicians, and pediatric oncology specialists — professionals who witness many deaths — consistently report that DBEs are a real, valuable, and welcome part of the dying process. Christopher Kerr, whose Buffalo-area hospice research included over fourteen hundred patients, found that end-of-life visions are extraordinarily common, typically comforting to both the dying and their families, and qualitatively different from the hallucinations associated with drugs or infection.27 Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, working in UK hospice care, reported similar patterns.
Witnesses who begin as skeptics often come to treat DBEs with respect after witnessing enough of them. I have spoken with hospice nurses who came into the job convinced that all end-of-life visions were medication side effects and walked out after a few years as quiet believers — not always in a specific religion, but in something beyond the material. The phenomenon is real enough, and frequent enough, that professional observation alters the observer.
Kerr's trajectory is itself telling. A physician trained in mainstream medicine, Kerr entered hospice work without any particular religious or spiritual commitments. What he saw in his patients over years of clinical practice gradually persuaded him that something remarkable was occurring at the end of life — something that deserved serious research rather than dismissal. He has since become a leading scientific voice for taking end-of-life visions seriously, though he himself frames the phenomenon in largely secular and psychological terms rather than explicitly religious ones. His research matters for our purposes because it is not coming from a Christian apologist eager to confirm a prior belief. It is coming from a medical scientist whose clinical observations led him to conclusions he did not expect.
Peter Fenwick's trajectory was similar. Trained as a neuropsychiatrist with all the standard materialist assumptions of late-twentieth-century medical science, Fenwick came to the study of end-of-life phenomena reluctantly and skeptically. Decades of clinical observation and research changed his views. He and his wife Elizabeth Fenwick eventually wrote The Art of Dying, which treats end-of-life visions as a real and meaningful part of human dying, worthy of both clinical attention and cultural recovery. Like Kerr, Fenwick is not a Christian partisan. His conclusions emerged from the data. That he reached the same general conclusions as Christian observers like Miller and Komp, from a very different starting point, strengthens the case that something real is being observed.
There is also a consistent effect on the dying person. DBEs typically produce peace. The dying patient who was anxious, restless, and fearful often becomes calm after a DBE. Sometimes the calm is so pronounced that it marks the turning point in the dying process — the body relaxes, the breathing slows, the struggle subsides, and death comes gently. Grieving families report again and again that the DBE was the most consoling part of an otherwise agonizing vigil. These effects are precisely what we would expect if the DBE were a real encounter with real love — and precisely what we would not expect from a random neurological event in a failing brain.
One of the most underrated points about DBEs is simply this: the phenomenon is not new. Christian pastors, chaplains, and hospice workers have been witnessing DBEs for centuries — quietly, locally, without research protocols or peer-reviewed journals. The phenomenon appears in Christian biography, in missionary memoirs, in the journals of old-time circuit-riding preachers, and in the unwritten oral memory of thousands of local congregations.28
John Burke, the evangelical pastor whose book Imagine Heaven draws extensively on NDE research, reports having family members describe deathbed visions of his dying mother, and he treats such experiences as ordinary signs of God's gracious attending to His people in their last hours.29 Billy Graham's grandmother reportedly saw Jesus in her final moments. The historical record is full of such accounts, and they blend naturally into the ordinary life of the church.
This matters for discernment because the DBE is not a novel phenomenon requiring new theological categories. It is not the latest thing out of the NDE movement. It is simply what the church has always seen at the bedside of dying believers. When we treat DBEs with warm reception, we are not innovating. We are conserving the pastoral wisdom of the church across centuries. The phenomenon is part of the normal Christian death — perhaps not universal, but deeply ordinary, and deeply consistent with what Scripture says about the Lord attending His dying saints (Psalm 23:4; Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 5:8).
· · ·
I have just spent considerable space arguing that DBEs warrant a default of warm trust. I want now to be honest about the exceptions. Not every DBE-like event warrants uncritical acceptance. A small category of DBE reports — I estimate around five percent, though again this is a working figure — deserves more careful evaluation. Here are the main categories to watch for.
Dying patients are often on powerful medications — opioids for pain, benzodiazepines for anxiety, various drugs for nausea and symptom control. Infections, metabolic imbalances, and the general breakdown of organ function can also produce altered mental states. Not every vision reported by a dying patient is a DBE in the proper sense. Some are hallucinations.
Fortunately, hallucinations and DBEs tend to have different phenomenological signatures. Hallucinations are typically frightening, incoherent, or nonsensical. A patient in drug-induced delirium may see spiders on the ceiling, believe the room is on fire, or carry on fragmented conversations with no one in particular. DBEs, by contrast, are typically peaceful, coherent, and involve recognizable figures — specifically, deceased loved ones or clearly identified religious figures like Jesus or angels. The affective tone is different too: hallucinations produce agitation; DBEs produce peace.30
Hospice professionals learn to distinguish these with practice. When in doubt, ask the medical team. The nurse who has been with your loved one for a week can usually tell you whether the content you are witnessing fits the delirium pattern or the DBE pattern.
When a person without professing Christian faith has a DBE — particularly a DBE that seems peaceful and includes perceptions of loved ones or luminous beings — the theological interpretation becomes more complex. Several possibilities are live at once.
It may be that the dying person is encountering the real God in their final hours, possibly even being met by Christ in a way the family never sees. My own theological framework leaves real room for this hope. I have argued elsewhere that God's redemptive reach extends further than we can always see, and that the final judgment itself may include a decisive encounter with Christ in which the soul's ultimate response is made clear.31 A peaceful DBE in a non-Christian may genuinely be a gracious meeting with the Lord. Or it may be the general grace of God allowing a gentle passing, without implying a redemptive outcome. Or, in rare cases, the content may be genuinely corrupted — though this is unusual.
What I counsel Christians at the bedside of a dying non-Christian loved one is not to pronounce but to pray. We cannot confidently declare the eternal state of any person we are not ourselves. What we can do is give thanks for the peace we see in the final hours, pray for the dying person's soul, and trust the One whose judgments are always just. The DBE is not a guarantee of salvation, but it is also not automatically evidence against it.
Very occasionally, a DBE report includes content that does not fit biblical teaching — a "message" that all religions lead to the same place, an instruction toward occult practice, an experience dominated by New Age categories. I have argued earlier in this book that genuine experiences can be filtered through corrupt interpretive lenses, and this is one context where that can happen.32
Such cases are unusual. Most DBEs lack theologically concerning content entirely. When concerning content does appear, the appropriate response is not to throw out the experience wholesale but to use the same experience-interpretation distinction I have applied throughout this book. The genuine elements can be received. The concerning elements should not be endorsed. And the family should not argue with a dying loved one in the final hours. Love them, pray for them, and sort out any theological questions later.
Sometimes a DBE comes to us through family members rather than directly from the dying person — a spouse's account of what grandma "must have seen," a son's interpretation of his father's last confused words. These secondhand reports are not worthless, but they can be shaped by the family's own grief, hope, or prior beliefs more than the experience itself was.
When possible, rely on direct reports from the dying person — their actual words, noted by multiple witnesses. When only secondhand reports are available, receive them with some care. A grieving widow who says, "I know she saw heaven" may be right. She may also be projecting. Time, further conversation, and gentle questioning can often distinguish the two.
Not every death-adjacent experience is a DBE in the technical sense. A patient who had a vivid dream about heaven two weeks before dying, and then reports it as a DBE, may have had a meaningful dream, a God-given vision, or just an ordinary dream — but it is not a DBE in the narrow sense in which researchers use the term. Similarly, a semi-conscious patient who mutters something about heaven between drug doses may or may not be reporting an actual perception.
I want to be gentle here. Dreams and visions both have biblical precedent, and God does sometimes speak through them. My point is not to dismiss dreams but to urge precision. When we are evaluating whether a dying person had a DBE in the research sense — with the structural features of clarity, peace, recognition, and usually a deceased loved one or religious figure — we should reserve the term for experiences that actually fit that pattern. This is a matter of clear thinking, not skepticism.33
The great majority of DBEs warrant warm trust. A small minority — medication effects mistaken for visions, secondhand accounts shaped by family grief, rare theologically corrupted content — requires more careful evaluation. Knowing this category exists guards Christians against naive credulity without undermining the warm default the phenomenon otherwise deserves.
· · ·
The categories I have just walked through are easier to understand with concrete cases. Let me present four, each intended to illustrate a different kind of DBE situation. The first two are paradigmatic DBEs warranting full confidence. The third illustrates a mixed DBE. The fourth addresses the DBE of a non-Christian.
Margaret was a seventy-eight-year-old widow dying of late-stage pancreatic cancer in a hospice facility. She had been a faithful Methodist all her life, active in her church, with a habit of Scripture reading and prayer that had continued through every decade since her conversion at summer camp at age fourteen. Her husband Robert had died six years earlier; she had missed him every day. In her final twenty-four hours, Margaret drifted in and out of consciousness. Her daughter Claire, her son Thomas, and the hospice nurse Yvonne were all present at various points.
About three hours before she died, Margaret opened her eyes, looked toward the ceiling above her bed, and smiled. "Oh, Robert," she said softly. She paused, listening to something no one else could hear. Then she said, "Yes, I'm ready." She turned her head toward Claire and said, simply and clearly, "He's come for me. And Jesus is with him." Her breathing slowed. She spoke no more. She died peacefully at 2:47 a.m.
This is a paradigmatic DBE. Consider its features. It is simple — a few short sentences, no extended theological content. It is witnessed — three people observed Margaret's behavior, her gaze, her tone, her specific words. Margaret had no career incentive — she was a widow in hospice care, not a conference speaker. The content is theologically clean — a deceased Christian husband and Jesus, which is exactly what one would expect if the biblical picture of the intermediate state is true. The experience produced deep peace — Margaret was ready. And Claire and Thomas, years later, still speak of the moment as one of the most precious in their lives.
The Christian response to a DBE like Margaret's is not discernment checklist work. It is thanksgiving. It is the grateful acknowledgment that the Lord met one of His people at the threshold and that she went home gently.
Notice what is not happening in Margaret's experience. There is no extended theological monologue. There is no message about how all religions are one. There is no instruction to contact a psychic medium afterward. There is no claim that the family has a special mission to spread a new gospel. There is simply a dying Christian woman seeing her deceased Christian husband and her Lord, saying she is ready, and dying peacefully. The content fits seamlessly with Psalm 23:4 and 2 Corinthians 5:8. Nothing in it would surprise any careful reader of Scripture.
If a reader wanted to run Margaret's DBE through the standard NDE discernment tests — does it include Scripture-contradicting content? does it encourage occult practice? does it produce good fruit in the experiencer's life? — Margaret's DBE passes every test. But more fundamentally, the simplicity of Margaret's experience means the discernment work is almost trivial. There is simply not enough content to evaluate, and what little there is falls entirely within the biblical picture.
Margaret's DBE displays every marker of a paradigmatic genuine deathbed experience: simplicity, witnessed behavior, theological cleanness, recognized figures (deceased Christian spouse and Jesus), the experience producing peace, and the dying person's explicit readiness to go. No discernment framework is needed beyond grateful reception.
Lily was six years old. She had been fighting a rare pediatric cancer for eighteen months. Her parents, Ben and Sarah, were both Christians, though not of a particularly expressive tradition. Lily had attended Sunday school but had received nothing like advanced theological teaching about death and the afterlife. She had been told, in age-appropriate terms, that God loved her and that heaven was a beautiful place. She had never been to an NDE conference. She had never read a heaven book.
On the last afternoon of her life, Lily opened her eyes and looked at a corner of the ceiling. "Mommy," she said, "the angels came. They're so pretty." Sarah, sitting beside her, asked her what they looked like. Lily said, "Like big people with light. No wings, Mommy." Sarah, who had expected her daughter to describe winged figures from children's book illustrations, was caught off guard. Lily smiled. "They said Jesus wants me. He's right here too. He's so happy." She closed her eyes. She died three hours later.
Notice how many of this book's discernment markers Lily's experience meets. She was too young to have constructed an elaborate vision from adult theological teaching. She reported angels without wings — contradicting the imagery she would have been exposed to in children's books, which is exactly the detail Barrett noticed as a marker of authenticity.34 She identified Jesus specifically, using vocabulary consistent with her simple theological understanding. The experience produced peace in her and, eventually, comfort in her parents. It was witnessed — Sarah was there, and so was Ben, who came in from the hospital lounge partway through. And Lily had no career incentive whatsoever.
Pediatric DBEs like Lily's are among the most evidentially powerful reports in the entire literature. They cannot be explained as the projection of adult religious teaching. They cannot be explained as wish fulfillment by an experiencer seeking comfort in dying — children her age do not work like that. They cannot be explained as career strategy. What they can be explained by is the hypothesis that Lily really did see what she reported seeing.
Gerald was a seventy-year-old retired engineer, nominally Lutheran but long inactive in church. In his last week of life, he began describing visions of "a beautiful place" and "a being of pure light." Some of his language was recognizably Christian — he spoke of Jesus being present, of his deceased mother, of peace. But other elements were concerning. At one point he told his daughter that "all the paths lead there" and that he now understood that his Buddhist neighbor and his Hindu colleague were on "the same road" as he was. His daughter, a committed Christian, did not know what to make of it.
This is a mixed DBE. The genuine elements are present — Jesus, deceased loved ones, peace. But so is a theologically concerning element — a universalist claim that contradicts Scripture (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). What should Gerald's family do?
First, they should not argue with him on his deathbed. This is not the moment for theological debate. Whatever is happening, Gerald is in his final hours, and the most important thing is love. Second, they should receive the genuine elements gratefully — Jesus really was with Gerald, and his mother really was there. Third, they should not endorse or repeat the concerning element as if it were part of Gerald's testimony. Fourth, they should pray earnestly for his soul, trusting that Christ who met him in the DBE can also bring him the rest of the way home. Fifth, they should understand, for their own peace, that a corrupted interpretation does not void the genuine experience; it simply means Gerald's mind was filtering the encounter through his own imperfectly formed beliefs.35
Mixed DBEs are rare, but they happen. The experience-interpretation distinction I have developed throughout this book applies here as it does to mixed NDEs. What the dying person perceives may be genuine; what they conclude from it may or may not be.
Priya was a sixty-two-year-old Indian-American woman who had been raised Hindu, drifted toward general spirituality in adulthood, and never made a profession of Christian faith. She was dying of leukemia. Her adult children, two of whom had become Christians in college, sat with her in shifts during her final week.
Two days before she died, Priya had a peaceful experience she later described to her daughter Meera. She said she had seen her own mother — dead for twenty years — and also her older brother, dead for five. She said they had told her not to be afraid. She reported "a wonderful light" and "a presence of love beyond anything I can tell you." She did not name Jesus. She did not speak in Christian terms. But the experience left her calm and unafraid for the remaining forty-eight hours of her life.
What should Meera, a Christian, make of this? Several possibilities are theologically open. One possibility: the Lord met Priya, by grace and in ways Meera could not see, and the peaceful DBE was part of a deeper encounter that extended into the moment of death itself. Christian missions history is full of stories of dying people in non-Christian backgrounds being met by Christ at the last.36 Another possibility: the DBE was a general mercy, a gentle passing granted by the God who sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), without necessarily implying salvation. A third possibility: the experience was a filtered perception that left ambiguity at the deepest level.
What Meera should not do is pronounce. We do not know with certainty. What she can do is give thanks for the peace her mother received, continue to pray for her mother's soul even after death (as some Christian traditions, including some Protestants, have always done), and trust the Lord whose judgments are always righteous and merciful. The DBE does not settle Priya's eternity; only the Lord can do that. But it is also not automatic evidence against it, and Meera need not torture herself with either certainty.37
· · ·
Most Christians who read this book will, sooner or later, find themselves at the bedside of a dying loved one. Some of those readers will witness a DBE. Many will not — not every death is accompanied by a visible DBE, and absence of a reported DBE does not mean the Lord was absent. But for those who do witness one, I want to offer a simple practical guide. These suggestions are drawn from my own reading of the pastoral literature, conversations with hospice professionals, and the counsel of experienced Christian chaplains.
Let me offer one preliminary word. If you are reading this chapter because a loved one has recently died without an obvious DBE, and you are quietly worried that the absence of one means something was wrong — please let me put that worry to rest. DBEs are common but not universal. Many saintly Christians die without any visible vision at all. Many die in their sleep, or under sedation, or in circumstances where no DBE could be observed even if one occurred. The DBE is a grace when it comes, but the absence of a visible DBE is not evidence of any spiritual problem. The same Lord who sometimes sends a vision sometimes simply carries His child home without announcing Himself to the family in the room. Receive whichever the Lord gives; do not grieve for the other.
Most DBEs happen when family or trusted caregivers are in the room. This is not accidental. The ministry of presence — simply being there — is itself part of the good the Lord is doing at the bedside. You do not have to know what to say. You do not have to produce the right theological words. You simply have to be with your dying loved one. Your presence is a gift, to them and to you.
I have known Christians who stayed away from dying relatives because they felt awkward, did not know what to do, or feared their own grief. I understand the impulse. But whenever possible, go. Sit. Be there. The hours you spend at the bedside of a dying Christian are among the most sacred hours you will ever experience.
When a dying person begins perceiving something the rest of us cannot see — fixing their gaze, smiling, reaching up, speaking to an unseen presence — the right response is to observe quietly. Do not interrupt. Do not ask skeptical questions. Do not try to correct their perception. Do not bring them back to "reality" as if what they are seeing is not real. They may be seeing more than we are.
Some hospice nurses counsel family members to simply be still during these moments, letting the dying person interact with whatever they are perceiving. The moment belongs to them. Our job is to witness it, not to manage it.
When the dying person shares what they are seeing — even fragments, even confused fragments — receive it with warmth. Simple affirmation is enough. "Grandma, that's beautiful. Jesus loves you." "Yes, sweetheart, the angels are there." "I'm so glad they came for you." You do not have to verify or test or evaluate in the moment. You can thank the Lord and trust Him.
If something concerning is said, resist the urge to correct or debate. You can gently redirect by affirming the genuine: "Yes, Jesus is there. He loves you so much." Do not ratify error, but do not make the final hours a theological battleground. Love covers a multitude of doctrinal untidiness in a dying moment.
DBEs are gifts not only to the dying person but to the community that witnesses them. Share what you saw with other family members, with your pastor, and with close Christian friends. Not in a way that exalts the experience above Scripture, but in a way that adds to the collective witness of the church that the Lord meets His people at the threshold.38
Every DBE told in the church strengthens the faith of those who hear it. It reminds us that death is real but is not the end, that the Lord is near to the dying, and that the stories we read in Miller and Burke and Tabatt are not far-off reports but ordinary visitations of the grace that meets our own families. I encourage you, gently, not to keep these stories private. They were not meant to be locked in a drawer.
After the loved one has died, the DBE becomes a resource for the grieving family. Grief is still real — no DBE cancels the pain of loss — but the grieving family who witnessed a DBE grieves with more hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). They know their loved one was met by the Lord. They know the transition was peaceful. They know what Scripture says about the intermediate state was not just a theological abstraction but something they saw with their own eyes.
If you are a pastor or chaplain ministering to a family after a DBE-accompanied death, ask them about it. Listen. Honor the memory. Help them integrate the experience into the larger framework of Christian hope — not as a replacement for Scripture but as a gracious illustration of what Scripture already teaches. The funeral of a believer whose death was accompanied by a DBE can be one of the most tender and hope-filled services a pastor ever leads.
If you are a pastor, chaplain, or lay Christian who ministers to the dying, please take DBEs seriously. Do not dismiss them as "that's just the medication." Do not interrogate them as if every dying grandmother's vision were a suspect theological claim. Do not pretend they do not happen. Receive them as what they usually are: gifts of grace, given to the dying and to those who love them, in the last hours of this life.
· · ·
This book is primarily a discernment handbook, not an apologetics volume. But I would be missing something if I did not note, briefly, that DBEs — taken together with NDEs, terminal lucidity, after-death communications, and other related phenomena — form a significant part of the broader evidential case for the biblical picture of the afterlife.39
Consider what the naturalist has to explain. She has to explain why dying people across every culture and every century report a consistent set of experiences. She has to explain why terminal lucidity occurs at all in patients whose brains cannot sustain consciousness. She has to explain Peak in Darien cases where the dying person reports seeing someone they did not know had died. She has to explain why children report DBE content that does not match the cultural imagery they have been exposed to. She has to explain why the phenomena produce consistent peace rather than random distress. And she has to explain all of this while maintaining her core claim that consciousness is simply what the brain produces and cannot exist apart from it.
The biblical picture of human nature — a real soul that can function when the body falters, a God who meets His people at death, a real afterlife into which the soul passes — explains the DBE phenomenon without strain. The naturalist picture explains it only by multiplying ad hoc hypotheses that do not hold together.40 As the evangelical philosopher John Cooper has argued at length, the conscious intermediate state is not an optional doctrine one adds to Christianity — it is what Scripture consistently teaches, and the DBE phenomenon is exactly what we would expect to see if that teaching is true.41
There is also a quieter theological point worth making. The evidence from DBEs is not evenly distributed in the way a pure materialist would expect, and it is not evenly distributed in the way a pure religious-projection theory would expect either. It is distributed in the way we would expect if the specific God of Scripture is the one attending His people in their final hours. Christians report Christ. Children report angels and light. Cross-cultural non-Christians report loving figures and peace, and in a subset of cases even report Christ Himself without having been taught about Him. The pattern is not "every religion's deity appears to its devotees equally." The pattern is closer to "Christ shows up across the board, but especially to those who already know Him, and sometimes surprisingly to those who do not." This pattern is harder to square with the projection hypothesis than it may first appear.42
I do not say any of this to replace faith with evidence. Christians do not believe in the intermediate state because of DBEs. We believe in it because Scripture teaches it. But the DBE phenomenon confirms and illustrates what Scripture teaches, in the ordinary experience of the dying church, across two thousand years. That is a gift of God's grace and worth receiving with thanksgiving.
Joshua Farris, whose recent introduction to theological anthropology I have drawn on elsewhere in this book, notes that the soul-body composition of human persons is not a peripheral doctrine but a central feature of the biblical and theological tradition.43 When Christians encounter DBEs, they are not encountering something foreign to their faith but something deeply at home in it. The soul survives death. It is with the Lord. It can be met by loved ones who have gone before. These are not novel claims derived from recent research. They are ancient Christian claims illustrated, over and over again, at the bedsides of dying saints. Michael Wilkinson has similarly argued that a Chalcedonian Christology — Christ in two complete natures, including a genuine human soul — is the theological backbone for taking seriously the encounter between dying saints and the risen, glorified Christ.44 The Jesus the dying grandmother meets is the same Jesus of Nazareth, raised and ascended, not a disembodied principle.
· · ·
When my grandmother looked toward the corner of the room and said, "Jesus, my Jesus," she was not a research subject. She was a dying woman meeting her Lord. My aunt and I were not a research team. We were a grieving family, being given one of the most precious gifts God gives to families. And what we saw that Tuesday afternoon in October — her face, her reach, her clarity, her peace — is a gift that has sustained my faith in ways I did not know, at the time, that it would.
This chapter has argued that the Christian default posture toward DBEs should be warm trust. The structural features of DBEs — simplicity, witnessed behavior, absence of career incentive, cross-cultural consistency, Peak in Darien verifiability, the phenomenon of terminal lucidity, theological cleanness, the striking evidential weight of children's DBEs, consistent effects on witnesses, and seamless integration with ordinary Christian pastoral experience — add up to a cumulative case for approximately ninety-five percent genuineness. The five-percent minority that warrants more careful discernment is real and should not be ignored, but it should also not drive us to excessive suspicion about a phenomenon that is, on the whole, one of the clearest gifts of God's gentle attending to His dying people.
I want to reiterate one theme that has run through this chapter, because I think it matters pastorally. The discernment posture this book has been cultivating is not skepticism. It is not the habit of treating every spiritual claim as a suspect until proven innocent. Skepticism of that kind tells more about the skeptic than about the evidence. The discernment posture I am teaching is something different: it is the habit of testing what needs to be tested, receiving what passes the test, and holding the unclear with gentle attentiveness. For DBEs specifically, most of what we encounter will not need heavy testing. The phenomenon itself does the heavy lifting. The dying grandmother who sees Jesus has already handed us most of what we need to receive her experience as a gift.
I have spent most of this book training the reader in discernment. I want to close this chapter by reminding the reader that discernment is a means to an end, not the end itself. The point of discernment is to free the Christian to receive what is genuine with joy, reject what is false with clarity, and walk faithfully in a world where both exist. For DBEs, discernment has largely done its work by the time the dying grandmother sits up and says, "Jesus is here." The posture at that moment is not suspicion. It is gratitude.
There is one more thing I want to say, and it is this. If you are reading this chapter and bracing yourself for a loved one's death that is approaching — or remembering one that recently happened — I want you to hear that the Lord goes with His people into the dark valley, and He does not always leave us on this side of the door without a sign of it. Sometimes He gives the dying saint a vision. Sometimes He gives the family a witnessed moment. Sometimes He gives both at once, and sometimes neither. But Scripture's promise is not conditioned on whether you saw anything. The promise is that the Lord is with His people, that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8), and that the saints who have gone before are safe in His care. DBEs, when they come, are gracious illustrations of a truth that is true whether or not we ever see it with our eyes.
The next chapter turns to something even more remarkable than the overall genuineness of DBEs: the surprising prominence of Jesus Christ specifically in both NDE and DBE reports — including among people from non-Christian backgrounds, children with no developed theology, and atheists who did not expect Him. That statistical pattern, documented across the research literature, is one of the most significant findings in the entire field. It is also, I will argue, one of the clearest pieces of empirical confirmation that the Christian faith has about its central claim: Jesus is Lord, and He really is the one who meets His people at death.
Barrett, William. Death-Bed Visions: The Psychical Experiences of the Dying. 1926. Reprint, Guildford, UK: White Crow Books, 2011.
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Ethier, Angela M. "Death Related Sensory Experiences." Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 22, no. 2 (2005): 104-111.
Farris, Joshua R. An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020.
Fenwick, Peter, and Elizabeth Fenwick. The Art of Dying: A Journey to Elsewhere. London: Continuum, 2008.
Greyson, Bruce. "Seeing Deceased Persons Not Known to Have Died: 'Peak in Darien' Experiences." Anthropology and Humanism 35, no. 2 (2010): 159-171.
Kerr, Christopher, with Carine Mardorossian. Death Is But a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End. New York: Avery, 2020.
Komp, Diane M. A Window to Heaven: When Children See Life in Death. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992.
Long, Jeffrey. God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience. New York: HarperOne, 2016.
Miller, J. Steve. Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2021.
Miller, J. Steve. "Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife: A Multicultural Examination of the Literature." PhD diss., Columbia International University, 2019.
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Morse, Melvin, with Paul Perry. Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children. New York: Villard Books, 1990.
Nahm, Michael, and Bruce Greyson. "Terminal Lucidity in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia and Dementia: A Survey of the Literature." Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 197, no. 12 (2009): 942-944.
Osis, Karlis, and Erlendur Haraldsson. At the Hour of Death. 3rd ed. Norwalk, CT: Hastings House, 1995. Originally published 1977.
Sabom, Michael. Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.
Tabatt, Shaun. The NDE Conspiracy. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025.
Wilkinson, Michael A. Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022.