Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms (10 page)

Suddenly amid the group appeared a young woman, slim, in brown traveling dress and wide bustle, with a straw hat trimmed by a speckled veil which could not hide the sly charm of her face. She slid a little suedegloved hand between one elbow and another of the weeping kneelers, apologized, drew closer. It was she, the creature forever yearned for, coming to fetch him; strange that one so young should yield to him; the time for the train’s departure must be very close.

While various media outlets insist that Westerners live in a “postreligious age” and are concerned with death solely as a technical struggle to stay alive, it’s clear that not all of our literature reflects that notion. Today, the publishing industry continues to focus on our preoccupation with understanding life’s final moments and what may or may not wait beyond them. Although some novelists eschew anything suggestive of fantasy, not all fiction writers are so restrained. Some concentrate on our fascination with immortality, reassuring us that an afterlife exists or that life itself doesn’t necessarily come to an end for some. Examples include the extremely popular and best-selling
Twilight
series by Stephenie Meyer as well as the vampire books of her predecessor Anne Rice.

Some contemporary novelists haven’t retreated from the deathbed vision of Dickens or Stowe, either. There’s Isabel Allende, for instance. In her 1982 novel,
The House of the Spirits,
the author imagines the protagonist’s grandmother coming to keep her dying grandfather company in his last days:

She did not leave him for a second, following him around the house, peering over his shoulder when he was reading in his library, lying down beside him and leaning her beautiful curly head against his shoulder when he got into bed. At first she was just a mysterious glow, but as my grandfather slowly lost the rage that had tormented him throughout his life, she appeared as she had been at her best, laughing with all her teeth and stirring up the other spirits as she sailed through the house.

Deathbed Visions in Films

Movies are also doing their part to reflect the phenomenon of deathbed visions. Death is often a central theme in many story lines on the big screen; in fact, visions and spirits of the deceased visiting their loved ones is a common occurrence. Take a moment to think about it and I bet you can name several films that include deathbed visions, spirits crowding the rooms of the living, and references to going home.

In Steven Spielberg’s
Saving Private Ryan,
audiences were shown the devastating costs of war in a way cinema had never presented before. In a pivotal scene, the company’s only field medic, Irwin Wade (Giovanni Ribisi), is mortally wounded in an unplanned raid. As he lay dying while his comrades try to stanch the bleeding, his final words are a cry to his mother and the assertion that he’s going home.

As I’ve mentioned previously, the most common deathbed vision includes a visit from one’s mother, and the notion of going home is so often uttered by the dying. There’s no screenwriting class or book that will tell you to always use someone’s mother for a deathbed vision or to get everyone “home” in the end. So why does this happen so frequently? Are these writers just reflecting upon real experiences, or does this hit some primal chord that exists deep within us all?

In
Terms of Endearment,
we laughed and then cried, especially when Emma Horton (played by Debra Winger) dies in the end. Only the consolation that Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson) offers Emma’s mother, Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine), keeps us going. (By that time, we’ve also become hooked on the dying Emma’s relationship with her mother.) Not to be left there, we were eventually taken back home to Texas in the sequel,
The Evening Star.
When Aurora is dying, who comes to comfort her? Her deceased daughter, Emma, of course.

The notion of a crowd of spirits surrounding the dying person also has its share of roles. Let’s think back to the blockbuster
Titanic.
Although Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio’s character) succumbs to hypothermia hours after the ship sinks, we see that Rose (Kate Winslet) survives and goes on to live a full life. Story over? Not really. What do the moviemakers do? At the very end, Rose (by now an old woman) is lying in bed, and we’re swept back to the RMS
Titanic
in all its glory. The audience is unsure if she is dreaming or has died in her sleep, but there we see young Rose reuniting with Jack on the grand staircase as a crowd of passengers cheer and applaud.

To simply show the two lovers reunited would have disregarded everyone else on the ship. What if death is that way, too? That is, what if there are crowds of people who greet the dying . . . much more often than we realize? A good example is in the movie
Ghost.
When Sam (played by Patrick Swayze) is at peace and his spirit can finally depart, he doesn’t just walk off into the light; a crowd is waiting for him.

Even in our comedies—from
Ghost Town
to
Beetlejuice
— people never seem to be alone in death. In
Thelma & Louise,
played brilliantly by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, we witness the women soaring to their deaths after driving a 1960s Ford Thunderbird convertible into the Grand Canyon. When the credits roll, we then see the actors alive again. We know that they’re just earlier scenes from their lives, and they’re there to help us focus on how they lived rather than on the violence of their deaths. Yet when we look deeper, I believe that this technique plays to our primal desire to transcend death.

In the film version of
Wuthering Heights,
based on the classic novel by Emily Brontë, the two lovers are finally together again in death. Heathcliff (played by Laurence Olivier) carries a dying Cathy (Merle Oberon) in his arms to her bedroom window, where they look out on the moors and Peniston Crag where they played together as children. Before her last breath, they make a promise to be together for eternity. And in the film’s final image, their ghosts are seen walking up to the Crag.

Science fiction deals with visions and immortality as well. At the end of
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi,
for example, we’re at the celebration of the destruction of the Death Star; but all those who had died are not forgotten, as Luke Skywalker gazes upon the smiling faces of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and Anakin . . . and waves good-bye.

It wasn’t a surprise for me to find deathbed visions in the arts. In fact, I would have been concerned if I hadn’t found references and archetypes illuminating whom and what we see before we die. I believe that we’ll continue to watch and read about the visions that comfort the dying because that is what resonates in our souls. What a wonderful experience to be greeted by our loved ones, who take us on thefinal journey to our heavenly home. The arts will always reflect this truth because, just as Dorothy affirms: “There’s no place like home.”

Let’s return to more first hand accounts of deathbed visions—these are stories told by professionals from the mental-health perspective.

CHAPTER FIVE

V
ISIONS OF THE
D
YING

Part II

“Now I want to go home.”
— final words of Vincent van Gogh

These next stories come from professional counselors with
formal training and licensure. They are often the ones who help
the dying manage the emotional upheaval that comes with saying
good-bye to all that they’ve known. Those who are in the mental-health
arena are often keenly aware of what is or isn’t authentic.
They spend their lives feeling the emotions of others and know
how to tell the difference between a patient with confusion or
hallucinations and one who has an extraordinary experience, such
as a deathbed vision. A book of this nature wouldn’t be complete
without hearing their stories firsthand.

N
O
T
IP
R
EQUIRED

by Angela

I am a psychologist who works with families and couples, and I specialize in addiction and chemical dependencies. When I counsel couples with so many problems, I often think back on my own parents, Helen and Milton. It makes me realize what a unique and wonderful relationship they had.

My parents were married for 62 years and could finish each other’s sentences. They shared everything, and one of their enduring qualities was a quirky sense of humor. Mom told me that when she found out she was pregnant with me, she’d asked Dad, “You sure
you
don’t want to carry this baby?” And when my father got a speeding ticket, the police officer was still standing there when Dad looked over to my mom sitting beside him and said, “Honey, you speed, too. Would you like a ticket?”

My father’s sense of humor also carried over to his work as a dentist, and his patients loved having a doctor who could make them laugh.
I
loved laughing with both of my parents, too, and decided they were the funniest parents a girl could have.

My parents used humor for life’s serious moments as well. For example, when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and needed a radical mastectomy, she quipped, “Oh, Milton, be a man—volunteer
your
breast. You don’t need yours like I need mine.”

One morning when Mom was getting up, she had a sudden aortic rupture and died instantly. She was 80. Dad did his best to cope, but he’d miss his beloved partner for the rest of his life.