Meaning and mystery
I attended the Afterlife Awareness conference in Virginia Beach last month and it was a terrific experience. There was a wonderful mix of topics and speakers—stretching and expanding boundaries of understanding and perceptions in lots of ways and I have to admit it has taken me some time to settle since returning.
At the conference I had the great pleasure of meeting with Dr Louis LaGrand whose work on the Extraordinary Experiences of the bereaved over the last thirty years is well known and respected. I attended his presentation and loved every moment, wishing only it could have been longer. Louis has a gift for listening, documenting, researching, and talking about the extraordinary experiences that bereaved people frequently have with an authenticity, warmth and enthusiasm that was such a pleasure to witness.
Having met Louis, albeit briefly, I reread some of his work on my return from Virginia Beach, in particular Love Lives On: learning from the extraordinary encounters of the bereaved and his most recent book, Healing Grief, Finding Peace. In both of these, there are examples of some of the Extraordinary Experiences that people may have, such as visions and apparitions, sensing the presence or hearing the voice of the deceased as well as messages received through touch, smell or even through a third party. While these experiences are intriguing and intrinsically interesting, Louis LaGrand, draws on his many years as a teacher, researcher, writer, grief counsellor and indeed pioneer in this whole area, and looks to the meaning these experiences hold and their potential for transforming the experiences of grief and loss.
There are an increasing number of accounts that document the range of transcendent, or beyond the ordinary, experiences surrounding death, dying and bereavement, all of which are interesting and attest to the frequency with which these experiences occur and an increasing willingness for people to speak of them or to find out more about them. However, few go beyond the documentation of these experiences and valuable as that is, it is the larger questions that these experiences prompt which I find particularly fascinating as well as their potential for learning to live more fully in this world—whatever about an afterlife.
Addressing these questions is precisely what Louis LaGrand has done and in a way that seems very grounded in his own experiences over many years of working with bereaved people—alongside the Extraordinary Experiences that are documented and discussed in these books, there are also a range of eminently sensible and wise recommendations for coping with loss and grief. But it’s clear too that Extraordinary Experiences have their own place in helping to bring comfort, peace and a way of continuing our relationships with the deceased.
I particularly like the title of chapter one in Love Lives On, ‘We are always in the embrace of mystery’ as it is in helping to incorporate the mysterious into the everyday reality that can release the transformative potential of these experiences. Louis LaGrand says that his work in this area has enhanced his sensitivity to the reality of the non-physical world and that we are all touched by it, even in ways we may not understand or perceive. Quoting Einstein, who said ‘the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science’, he says that Extraordinary Experiences can open up people to the presence of mystery, for those who already believe and those who don’t. These extraordinary encounters, in whatever form they take, can have dramatic shifts in beliefs and behaviours that ‘otherwise might take years of therapy or major lifestyle alteration to achieve’.
Louis LaGrand encourages people to look for mystery whilst they are grieving and to use the emotional energy generated to face the challenges that must be faced. Healing Grief, Finding Peace: 101 ways to cope with the death of your loved one is a manual for anyone who has suffered loss and is clearly grounded in his years of experience working with the bereaved. One recommendation in this book is to ‘trust mystery and the unknown’ and it is here where LaGrand talks about the extraordinary experiences that many many people report after the death of their loved ones. As he says ‘they are convinced a sign or a message has been given to them by the deceased, angels or a supreme being. Many pray for a sign. They know there are physical forces in the universe other than those recognised by science’. He goes on say ‘look for and expect mystery in your grief work. Believe that there is a reason mystery and the unknown exist…when you receive one of these gifts, the message is: you are loved, you have been given to, so give back, and make giving a priority each day. This is the message of mystery’.
In Love lives on, LaGrand speaks more on mystery and why it is important in our lives. He asks, ‘what, exactly, does mystery do for us and why is it so important? Extraordinary Experiences can be a way to open up to the spiritual aspects of life, giving peace and hope for the future and the spiritual strength to adapt to loss. Extraordinary Experiences also offer meaning, however that is constructed, which LaGrand argues is ‘the pivotal force around which life and death revolve’. I am going to leave the last words to Louis LaGrand but would highly recommend these books and also recommend that you look up his web site: http://www.extraordinarygriefexperiences.com
‘Exploring and accepting Extraordinary Experiences opens our hearts to mystery. Accepting mystery brings us hope. Hope gives us the power to find meaning in a life that might, in the aftermath of the death of a loved one, seem utterly meaningless. Thus, Extraordinary Experiences give meaning to loss and death’.
(Love lives on: Learning from the extraordinary encounters of the bereaved, 2006, Berkley Books, New York)
Anticipation
It’s been quite some time since I posted on the site. Pressures of other work have kept me away but also I tend to write when I have something I want say rather than to fill a space.
My sense on increasing anticipation and excitement about the forthcoming Afterlife Awareness conference in March at Virginia Beach has prompted me to write about the potential of near to death experiences to transform understanding and ways of considering death and dying.
I have written before about the Afterlife Awareness Foundation, which is an Oregon based non-profit corporation dedicated to furthering awareness and education about death and the afterlife. I am attending and speaking at their forthcoming conference and really looking forward to it—check it out at www.AfterlifeConference.com. There may be places still available.
This conference is breaking through traditional boundaries with the range of presentations across the whole spectrum of research, science, practice and experience and in so doing is exactly the kind of mix that I think is needed to more fully understand these experiences and what we be learn from them. Speaking at the conference will be a number of people who have been ground breaking in their own research and publications—Dr Raymond Moody, who published Life After Life in 1975, coining the term ‘near death experience’ and he continues capture public interest with his work on the near-death experiences. Dr Melvin Morse, a pediatrician, who has studied near-death experiences in children for over 15 years and has several books on the subject such as Closer to the Light and Parting Visions, will also be speaking. As will Louis LaGrand, who has written extensively on the extraordinary experiences of the bereaved, I am a great admirer of his work and look forward to meeting him.
Alongside these speakers are numerous practitioners in the area of spirituality, for example Kelsey Colins, a Unity minister, hospice chaplain and author of Exit Strategy…Leaving this Life with Grace and Gratitude. She is also a mother whose son committed suicide at age 28. Her experience with his death altered her spiritual perspective, and led her to help grieving individuals understand that suicide is not a sin or an evil act, but an opportunity for the soul to seek healing and expansion for itself and others.
Terri Daniel, the organizer of the conference will be speaking about The Metaphysics of Forgiveness. Terri was to speak at a conference in Dublin last year and I was looking forward to hearing her then. Unfortunately she wasn’t able to make it but now I am going to Virginia to hear her get to grips with what really is a difficult area. As she says, ‘most people believe that forgiveness means condoning or accepting transgressions that have been committed against us by others. But when viewed with Divine eyes, one realizes that there are no ‘others’ in the universe. By releasing the concept of blame and healing the emotional wounds and fear-based beliefs that we carry from one lifetime to the next, a new form of forgiveness can emerge in which there are no tragedies, no traumas, no victims and no perpetrators… only souls journeying together on a path to wisdom and awareness’.
There is also increasing acceptance of people with mediumistic skills and expertise, as one way of understanding and helping with grief and it’s great to see so many practitioners from this arena presenting at the conference. Although some remain skeptical of these abilities, certainly in scientific and academic communities, I have had direct experience of how helpful it is to feel in contact with deceased loved ones and a degree of understanding of just what a difficult and skillful task mediumship is. The degree of skill required is poorly understood and possibly the area has not been served well by some practitioners in the past—but that’s also true for almost any other area or field, finance and banking in recent years is one that springs to mind!
I’ll be speaking about harnessing the transformative power of near to death experiences and the state of anticipation I’m experiencing about the forthcoming conference has reminded me of many experiences related to me in research I conducted in an Irish hospice and which are featured in my book, Sociological and spiritual aspects of palliative care in Ireland (2011).
While the experiences surrounding death and dying can be difficult and painful, especially for those left behind, looking at it from a different perspective—that of the person who is dying—shows that there is a potential to see this differently. Sally, one of the home care nurses that I spoke with, told me about her own personal experience with her aunt who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
‘My aunt of seventy-nine was diagnosed with cancer. And I remember I was doing the bereavement work [educational course], she was down in the hospital. So I had been doing the bereavement and all the care of the dying and I said, well, I am going to help her and get her to come to terms with her dying. … She told me about her diagnosis and I remember saying to her “how do you feel?” she turned round to me and said, “I can’t wait”. I said, “what do you mean?” And she said “I am sitting here and I am having conversations with my twin” and all her sisters who had died before her. She was in that other place and communicating, this was real for her, with her friends, her sisters…. she couldn’t, it wasn’t that she couldn’t wait but that she was ready and she was in that other halfway place where they had come and she was ready for her next adventure and I will never forget that.’
Near to death experiences have a lot to tell us about different ways to consider the experiences of death and dying and I am looking forward to finding out more and I’ll keep you posted.
Who says what and who gets listened to
Creating social maps is one way of making visible social practices and ways of talking about aspects of social life. In so doing, the intriguing questions of ‘who says what and who gets listened to’ raise their head. Underneath these questions are layers of knowledge and power, just as Harley has observed in the creation of maps of the physical landscape.
Most of the time the answers to these questions aren’t surprising or unexpected. There is an expectation for specialists to talk knowledgeably about their subject and most of the time this isn’t questioned too deeply or for too long—not many have the depth of knowledge for that level of questioning. A high degree of trust is placed in specialists, not just in science and medicine but also in many other spheres, for example banking and finance. When this goes wrong there can be an undermining of confidence, security and knowledge about the world and our place in it.
Some years ago my interest in the questions of ‘who says what and who gets listened to’ led me to review the way in which accounts of deathbed visions and the ‘sense of presence’ experiences in bereavement, were talked about in a variety of professional disciplines. With my interest in deathbed visions I was always curious as to why so little was written about them. The publication of Raymond Moody’s book Life after Life in 1975 brought accounts of near death experiences into the limelight. For much of the period I was reviewing (1969–1999), and certainly following Moody’s publication, near death experiences seemed to be the only show in town. The lack of attention to deathbed experiences intrigued me —did this mean that people had stopped having them or had stopped talking about them? If so, why?
I was also interested in the ‘sense of presence’ occurrences that many bereaved people experience. ‘Sense of presence’ is really an umbrella term for a range of experiences including seeing the deceased person, hearing them or having a sense of a smell associated with them or even just a ‘knowing’ that the person is still them.
At the time of my research, these ‘sense of presence’ experiences had just begun to be formulated within a new theoretical understanding of bereavement. Traditional models of bereavement have tended to view the task of the mourner as one of detaching or ‘letting go’ of the deceased in order to move on with their own lives. The Continuing Bonds framework, developed by Denis Klass and Phyllis Silverman amongst others, challenges this. Instead it considers the purpose of grieving is to maintain a continuing bond with the deceased but one that is still fits with other relationships— existing and new. Within this framework, the ‘sense of presence’ experiences fit more easily accommodated and are not considered as unusual or strange.
Although they may appear to be separate types of experiences, after listening to Denis Klass at the University of Reading in 1999, I was struck by similarities in the language used to describe them. Both ‘sense of presence’ experiences and deathbed visions involve people, in some sense, living in two worlds at the same time and engaging in a form of dialogue between this world and another. They can be difficult to understand or interpret and for people to talk about what is possibly a very contradictory way of looking at the social world. Metaphor and symbolism are frequently used to describe these experiences, and many people, although not all, tend to talk about emotional aspects such as hope, solace and comfort—these do not lend themselves easily to scientific enquiry. Like deathbed visions they are, for the most part, helpful and reassuring. However they may still be problematic for some disciplines to understand and interpret—although not necessarily so for the people involved.
The second reason for looking specifically at deathbed visions and ‘sense of presence’ experiences was that I was very taken with the idea of the dying and dead being less ‘troublesome’ than those still living. Sociologist Clive Seale made this point when talking in 1998 about the medicalisation of grief. The words he used—‘the dying present a less pressing political problem than those with lives yet to lead, with the potential for disorder and trouble that the living can present’—made me wonder about how, and how often, these two sets of experiences, were discussed in the literature. If Seale is correct, then the ‘sense of presence’ experiences should be discussed more frequently, because they impact on the lives of those still living.
In the literature on both experiences it is clear that accounts of these have moved, over time, through different discourses. Deathbed visions have been rooted in a religious discourse but have also moved through the areas of psychic research, medicine, and more recently are talked about from the perspective of caring for people who are dying. In a similar way, ‘sense of presence’ experiences are probably contained within folklore and literature but have moved into the area of psychology with the development of psychological models of bereavement.
For the research two works provided a baseline for evaluating contemporary understanding of the experiences. Dr Dewi Rees’s ‘Hallucinatory reactions of bereavement’, published in the British Medical Journal in 1971 and the cross-cultural study on ‘Deathbed observations by physicians and nurses’ undertaken by Osis and Haraldsson and published in 1977.
Going back to the issue of specialists and trust, both these studies remain benchmarks for ongoing research, although undertaken over thirty years ago. Both Dr Rees and Professor Haraldsson remain interested and engaged in researching these experiences. I had the great pleasure of meeting both men—most recently Erlendur Haraldsson at the Natural Death Centre ‘Salon discussion’ in London during July 2011. Dewi Rees continues his work, publishing Pointers to Eternity in 2010, reviewing recent research on people’s experiences of their dead spouses. It’s good to know that research and inquiry in these matters is in such trusted hands.
Filling in the blanks
Conducting research on understandings of a ‘good death’ in Irish palliative care a few years ago I struggled with understanding the differing perspectives of all the people involved. While at first pass it may seem that a ‘good death’ is essentially and profoundly personal—defined by the person who is dying—a closer view reveals a more complex picture. Behind the question, what is a ‘good death’ a second quickly follows—a ‘good death’ for whom? Straightaway the question of perspective becomes an important one.
Every death impacts on other people. Family and friends stand closest to the person and their perception is shaped by a shared history and intimate knowledge of the person who is dying. Others stand at a distance but nonetheless can have a significant impact, for example differences in access to resources and services shape the experiences of death dying—both positively and negatively.
My research focused on differing understandings of a ‘good death’. This had not been my original starting point. I began with the intention of researching one aspect of near-to-death experiences—deathbed visions—a long time interest of mine. Like many journeys the route to a destination can have unexpected turnings. In an initial study, I found when people talked about deathbed visions; they talked about them in the context a ‘good death’. Somewhat reluctantly I was forced to take a wider view and to explore the hinterland of the world of death and dying.
In trying to find my own way through this, I developed what I call a ‘social mapping’ approach—inspired in part by sociologist Norbert Elias’s claim that on the ‘social map’ of death and dying there were many blank areas. I also found the idea of a ‘social map’ attractive—because of my own love of maps and the way in which they can represent the complexities of a physical, and social, landscape in such an ordered and frequently pleasing way.
This cartographic approach worked really well—as an organising principle and a methodological approach—more importantly social mapping helped me to see elements that did not at first glance appear connected and to understand relationships within palliative care that shape and influence perceptions of a ‘good death’.
Maps, although frequently pleasing and certainly useful, are not neutral documents; they can be works of art, propaganda pieces, expressions of local pride, tools of indoctrination and more. The geographer J B Hartley likened cartography to a form of knowledge and power—who draws the map and what is documented as important features are key questions. Institutions such as the Ordnance Survey have their origins in surveying the landscape for defensive or revenue purpose. In England, a perceived threat of invasion from France at the end of the eighteenth century provided the stimulus to embark on a detailed survey of the southern coastline. In Ireland the Ordnance Survey Office, established in 1824, completed a survey of the entire island of Ireland to update land valuations for land taxation purposes in 1846—the survey at a scale of 6 inches to 1 mile meant that Ireland became the first country in the world to be entirely mapped in such detail.
Maps of the physical landscape are social too. Depictions of landscape and landmarks, cities and towns, the rise and fall of the demesne, plantation house or industrial buildings over time—all tell their own story. So what is different about social mapping and specifically a social map of death and dying?
Sociology, a relatively new discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, approached the study of society in a systematic and structural way—not a million miles away from the highly organised and structured approach of the Ordnance Survey. Almost from the beginning a focus on mortality provided a rich source of information. A founding father of Sociology, Emile Durkheim, developed his classic theory on suicide and levels of social integration through an analysis of suicide rates. In the process he pioneered modern social research and a structural approach to measure the well being of societies, and the people who live in them. Analysis of mortality data allows social, economic, behavioural and environmental factors to become more visible and social variables such as age, geographical location, gender, and social class help in understanding life-expectancy at a glance and sometimes startlingly so.
This structural approach and analysis provides a firm framework and overview of the who, where and why of death as well as some insight into social conditions, but this is only part of the picture. Statistics can state that 5000 people die each year of cancer but can’t go near understanding what that experience is like for terminally ill people or their families. The social experience of death and dying is shaped by beliefs and attitudes as much as access to health and social care.
In social research, from the around the 1950s attention was turned to the meaning of the social experiences, leading to an understanding of the dynamic between the individual and society and the degree to which the actions of one shape the other and vice versa. In mapping terms an understanding of beliefs, attitudes, and actions and how these shape the social structures and institutions is similar to the effect that human actions have on the landscape; altering and changing it constantly. Richard Williams, in a study on the attitudes to illness and death amongst older people in Aberdeen, Scotland, likened attitudes and beliefs about death and dying to ‘historical strata laid down by a culture in motion’. Traces of the past, in terms of beliefs, attitudes and individual action are visible in the present social landscape in much the same way that archaeological excavation reveals evidence of human action—often in clearly defined strata on a section face—shaping our current landscape.
Uncovering and revealing beliefs and attitudes to near to death experiences as well as documenting accounts, contemporary and historical, which shape the understanding of these experiences is not unlike the process of excavation—and I see this as part of the work of this website.