The Sunday Read: ‘What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living’

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His
memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of
mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout
Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy
to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing
trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness.
Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the
buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something
about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the
woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a
good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.


Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His
father wasn’t delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to
a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the
wilds of northern Canada.


Kerr followed his father into medicine, and in the last 10 years
he has hired a permanent research team that expanded studies on
deathbed visions to include interviews with patients receiving
hospice care at home and with their families, deepening
researchers’ understanding of the variety and profundity of these
visions.