Visitors at the End of Life - by Allan Kellehear (Paperback)

About the Book

This book is about how, when, and why our dead visit us. Allan Kellehear--a medical sociologist and expert on death, dying, and palliative care--has gathered data and conducted studies on deathbed visions across cultures.

Book Synopsis

About 30 percent of hospice patients report a "visitation" by someone who is not there, a phenomenon known in end-of-life care as a deathbed vision. These visions can be of dead friends or family members and occur on average three days before death. Strikingly, individuals from wildly diverse geographic regions and religions--from New York to Japan to Moldova to Papua New Guinea--report similar visions. Appearances of our dead during serious illness, crises, or bereavement are as old as the historical record. But in recent years, we have tended to explain them in either the fantastical terms of the supernatural or the reductive terms of neuroscience.

This book is about how, when, and why our dead visit us. Allan Kellehear--a medical sociologist and expert on death, dying, and palliative care--has gathered data and conducted studies on these experiences across cultures. He also draws on the long-neglected work of early anthropologists who developed cultural explanations about why the dead visit. Deathbed visions conform to the rituals that underpin basic social relations and expectations--customs of greeting, support, exchange, gift-giving, and vigils--because the dead must communicate with us in a social language that we recognize. Kellehear emphasizes the personal consequences for those who encounter these visions, revealing their significance for how the dying person makes meaning of their experiences. Providing vital understanding of a widespread yet mysterious phenomenon, Visitors at the End of Life offers insights for palliative care professionals, researchers, and the bereaved.

Review Quotes

A respectful examination of visitations from the dead on a deathbed and in bereavement, Kellehear adds to an emerging body of work that is of great interest. Visitors at the End of Life does an excellent job addressing this topic with an objective and serious tone.--Kenneth J. Doka, coauthor of Death and Dying, Life and Living, eighth edition, and senior consultant, Hospice Foundation of America

Establishing quickly that near-death experiences, deathbed visions, and visions of the bereaved are commonplace, Kellehear examines how these experiences exemplify established principles of social interaction and addresses perhaps a crucial question: What can these experiences offer to the dying, their family and friends, and humanity at large? A must-read for anyone with a personal or professional interest in the human dying and bereavement processes.--Janice Miner Holden, editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies

In Visitors at the End of Life, Allan Kellehear moves beyond whether visits from dead are real or imagined and probes the deeper question of what they mean. Illustrating with copious accounts of visitations, Kellehear makes them as understandable as any other social encounter. Visitors at the End of Life contains much wisdom and much comfort for the bereaved.--Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia

Just what is the social logic behind human experiences of our dead? This renowned death-studies scholar challenges us to create an 'intellectual space' to question simplistic answers by reframing our approach to the enigmas of experience encountered by millions across diverse world cultures.--Douglas Davies, Durham University

About the Author

Allan Kellehear is 50th Anniversary Professor of End of Life Care at the University of Bradford. His books include A Social History of Dying (2007) and The Inner Life of the Dying Person (Columbia, 2014).