Thoughts as you approach your own death

spnadmin · #1 (**permalink**) 24-Oct-2010, 12:50 PM

Stan Goldberg
End of Life Issues Examiner

How do we “know” something? How do we know anything? Our primary sources usually involve written documents or the spoken word, with information ranging from ludicrously false to probably true. Yet, most of the time, even the most “objective” information has a slight personal twist to it, placing a layer between it and us. What we know in these instances is what another source has said about it.

Our “knowing” gains more credibility if we personally have witnessed or participated in something. It’s one thing to say “I read it,” and quite another to say “I saw it.” Most of my end-of-life articles for the past eight years falls into the “I saw it,” category on issues directly relating to death and grief. What I have witnessed in the deaths of my patients and the grief of their families often bears little resemblance to what some books and academics say I should be experiencing.

And then, there’s the type of information derived from experiences so personal that what you know reaches the level of “knowledge.” I’m often asked what people think as they approach death. Not weeks or days before, but very close to it. Until last night, I could only explain what I saw.

I woke at midnight with an incredible pain in my abdomen. A little Pepto Bismol, I thought, and I’d be fine. But I wasn’t fine. As the intensity of the pain increased and spread, I began having difficulty breathing and almost passed out.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/spiritual-articles/32898-thoughts-you-approach-your-own-death.html

“Should we go to the emergency room?” My wife, Wendy, asked. Based on my past reluctance to seek medical attention, I’m sure she expected me to say, “Let’s wait 15 minutes.”

“No, call 911,” I said in a whisper.

After dressing and stumbling down the stairs, I laid on the couch and for the first time ever, thought I was dying. Did I have any of the amazing revelations some teachers and authors say the dying have? No. Did I think about my life: those things I regretted doing and what I wouldn’t achieve? No. What I thought about was the pain, nothing else.

Paramedics and firemen were in the house less than four minutes after Wendy called. Their reactions to my breathless words, gray pallor, and pained facial expression confirmed my belief that, indeed, I was dying. By the time I was in the ambulance, the pain was cyclical—a few minutes of ascending pain, a few minutes of descending pain. When the pain diminished, allowing me a window of rationality, I looked back at my life and realized my hospice patients had taught me well.

“If I die now,” I said to myself as the paramedics attached leads to my chest, inserted an IV, and spoke to the hospital emergency staff by radio, “I haven’t left much unsaid or undone.” For eight years I have been a midwife to death and witnessed what made some deaths easier than others. I learned the importance of forgiving those who did unskillful acts against me, asking for forgiveness from those I wronged, letting go of what no longer worked, communicating heart-felt feelings, and I trying to live my life with compassion and love. If I was to die, I had cleaned my plate of those things I observed made dying difficult. I realized my hospice patients had given me more than experiences. They had conveyed a knowledge about dying that had practical consequences.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” the paramedic said as the ambulance sped to the hospital.

“Yes. Either get better shocks for the truck or have San Francisco fill it’s potholes.”

As we laughed and bounced along the streets, my belief that I was dying diminished. After six hours and many tests, the diagnosis was uncertain: probably an ulcer created by continuously taking ibuprofen.

We often fret and wonder how we will act in certain situations. Some have comparatively minor consequences, such as what we’ll say when something embarrassing we did is uncovered. Others are pervasive, such as how we will approach our deaths.

I was given a dress rehearsal—one that was frightening, but also enlightening. What I experienced when I thought I was dying was a confirmation of those things I witnessed that eased my patients’ deaths:

1. Forgiving the unskillful acts of others
2. Letting go of what no longer works
3. Giving unconditionally
4. Communicating from the heart
5. Being compassionate (if not, at least understanding)
6. Not afraid to love
7. Asking for forgiveness for your own unskillful words and acts.

Every death is unique. But these seven lessons are a good starting point. Above all else, don’t wait, that pain you experience might be more serious than an ulcer.

Stan Goldberg is author of the award-winning book Lessons for the Living: Stories of Forgiveness, Gratitude,and Courage and the End of Life.

http://www.examiner.com/end-of-life-...your-own-death

findingmyway · #2 (**permalink**) 25-Oct-2010, 04:17 AM

Live in the present and not the past or future so you have no regrets is what my car accident taught me! Also never leave an argument unresolved as you never know whats going to happen.

Thanks for posting such a wonderful article spnadmin kudihug

spnadmin · #3 (**permalink**) 25-Oct-2010, 04:34 AM

You are welcome. I had no idea what the reactions would be. Some people may think it is morbid. However the man who wrote the article is professionally involved in hospice and spiritual care of the dying on a daily basis.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

My own experience has been - when facing death in a very real and personal way -- which I have, it is now impossible for anyone to scare me with "the punishment of death" as some have tried. "The angel of death, the jamdoots, are coming for you, etc. etc."

Death is not frightening. Thinking about death can be frightening. Depends on what you are thinking.

findingmyway · #4 (**permalink**) 25-Oct-2010, 06:40 AM

Death is the only reality!! We all die at some point so why be scared of something that is inevitable? Gurbani also tells us not to be afraid of death so I feel fear in death is completely irrational. I'm more afraid of bugee jumping (but have been skydiving so go figure!)

Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

The article merely uses death as a way of showing how to live. When faced with one, it is easier to remember the other as many get too busy in expectations and emotions to really live life.

No angel of death in gurbani so i don't think you have to worry about the existence of one. We don't live in Harry Potter's world cheerleader

Ishna · #5 (**permalink**) 25-Oct-2010, 08:50 AM

Yes, thank you spnadmin for the great article. It's good to hear the thoughts of someone who works in hospice and has also had a relatively near death experience. Got both perspectives there!
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

The realisation that we will all someday die is an incrediblly motivating force.

I think the process of dying seems scarier than actually dying.

Gurbani tells me my wedding day is coming and I should get ready by attuning myself to Naam, living honestly, helping people and being in chardi kala (which is hard to do all the time!). Knowing that it is going to happen makes me more motivated to try and be the best I can be.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

Ishna

Sinister · #6 (**permalink**) 26-Oct-2010, 10:27 AM

scarier than death itself is the experience leading up to it.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

that is what I think people fear more, not death itself but the physical pain of pre death...when you are "circling the drain".

Seeker9 · #7 (**permalink**) 28-Oct-2010, 03:28 AM

If it's not going off at a tangent in this thread, the concept of the "near death experience" is something I would like to discuss
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

What do people think is happening here?
Is it something to do with a combination of natural brain functions and one's one vivid imagination?
Or is it something supernatural?

Why do young children who are too young to have any concept of God or belief in a particular religious figurehead nonetheless have such experiences, which is evidenced by the pictures they draw afterwards?
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

Clearly something has happened.......

findingmyway · #8 (**permalink**) 28-Oct-2010, 04:31 AM

Near Death Experiences Explained?

Bright lights, angelic visions products of too much CO2 in the blood study says.

A patient undergoes open-heart surgery (file photo).
Photograph by LM Otero, AP

James Owen
for National Geographhic News
Published April 8, 2010
Near-death experiences are tricks of the mind triggered by an overload of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, a new study suggests.
Many people who have recovered from life-threatening injuries have said they experienced their lives flashing before their eyes, saw bright lights, left their bodies, or encountered angels or dead loved ones.

In the new study, researchers investigated whether different levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide—the main blood gases—play a role in the mysterious phenomenon. The team studied 52 heart attack patients who had been admitted to three major hospitals and were eventually resuscitated. Eleven of the patients reported near-death experiences.

During cardiac arrest and resuscitation, blood gases such as CO2 rise or fall because of the lack of circulation and breathing. "We found that in those patients who experienced the phenomenon, blood carbon-dioxide levels were significantly higher than in those who did not," said team member Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, of the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

CO2 Only Common Factor in Near-Death Experiences
Other factors, such a patient's sex, age, or religious beliefs—or the time it took to revive them—had no bearing on whether the patients reported near-death experiences.

The drugs used during initial treatment—a suggested explanation for near-death experiences after heart attacks—also didn't seem to correlate with the sensations, according to the study authors.

How carbon dioxide might actually interact with the brain to produce near-death sensations was beyond the scope of the study, so for now "the exact pathophysiological mechanism for this is not known," Klemenc-Ketis said. However, people who have inhaled excess carbon dioxide or have been at high altitudes, which can raise the blood's CO2 concentrations, have been known to have sensations similar to near-death experiences, she said.

A Glimpse of the Afterlife?
The study is among the first to find a direct link between carbon dioxide in the blood and near-death experiences, or NDEs, said Christopher French, a psychologist at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit of the University of London, who was not involved in the new research. The hospital study bolsters previous lab work done in the 1950s that found "the effects of hypercarbia [abnormally high levels of CO2 in the blood] were very similar to what we would now recognise as NDEs," French said in an email.
The research also supports the argument that anything that disinhibits the brain—damages the brain's ability to manage impulses—can produce near-death sensations, he said. Physical brain injury, drugs, and delirium have all been associated with a disinhibited state, and CO2 overload is another potential trigger.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

Still, not all scientists are convinced: "The one difficulty in arguing that CO2 is the cause is that in cardiac arrests, everybody has high CO2 but only 10 percent have NDEs," said neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London. What's more, in heart attack patients, Fenwick said, "there is no coherent cerebral activity which could support consciousness, let alone an experience with the clarity of an NDE."

The main alternative is that near-death experiences are "evidence of consciousness becoming separated from the physical substrate of the brain, possibly even a glimpse of an afterlife," the University of London's French noted. But for him, at least, "the latest results argue strongly against such a hypothesis."
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...arbon-dioxide/

Seeker9 · #9 (**permalink**) 28-Oct-2010, 04:50 AM

I usually avoid links but this one has too much text:
http://www.globalideasbank.org/natdeath/ndh3.html
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898

I have copied a couple of accounts from children below:

A nine-year-old tours heaven

I marvelled at Katie when she came into the office. She was a pretty girl with long blond hair and a shy, frightened manner. Her eyes revealed an intelligence that hadn't been dimmed by the deprivation of oxygen to the brain that always accompanies drowning. There was nothing abnormal in her walk or mannerisms. She was just another nine-year-old kid. Katie clearly remembered me. After introducing myself, she turned to her mother and said, 'That's the one with the beard. First there was this tall doctor who didn't have a beard, and then he came in.' Her statement was correct. The first into the emergency room was a tall, clean-shaven physician named Bill Longhurst.
Katie remembered more. 'First I was in the big room, and then they moved me to a smaller room where they did X-rays on me.' She accurately noted such details as having 'a tube down my nose', which was her description of nasal intubation. Most physicians intubate orally, and that is the most common way that it is represented on television.
She accurately described many other details of her experience. I remember being amazed at the events she recollected. Even though her eyes had been closed and she had been profoundly comatose during the entire experience, she still 'saw' what was going on.
I asked her an open-ended question: 'What do you remember about being in the swimming pool?'
'Do you mean when I visited the Heavenly Father,' she replied.
Whoa, I thought. 'That's a good place to start. Tell me about meeting the Heavenly Father.'
'I met Jesus and the Heavenly Father,' she said. Maybe it was the shocked look on my face or maybe it was shyness. But that was it for the day. She became very embarrassed and would speak no more.
I scheduled her for another appointment the following week.
What she told me during our next meeting changed my life. She remembered nothing about the drowning itself. Her first memory was of darkness and the feeling that she was so heavy she couldn't move. Then a tunnel opened and through that tunnel came 'Elizabeth'.
Elizabeth was 'tall and nice' with bright, golden hair. She accompanied Katie up the tunnel, where she saw her late grandfather and met several other people. Among her 'new friends' were two young boys - 'souls waiting to be born' - named Andy and Mark,who played with her and introduced her to many people.
At one point in the voyage, Katie was given a glimpse of her home. She was allowed to wander throughout the house, watching her brothers and sisters play with their toys in their rooms. One of her brothers was playing with a GI Joe, pushing him around the room in a jeep. One of her sisters was combing the hair of a Barbie doll and singing a popular rock song.
Finally, Elizabeth - who seemed to be a guardian angel to Katie - took her to meet the Heavenly Father and Jesus. The Heavenly Father asked if she wanted to go home. Katie cried. She said she wanted to stay with him. Then Jesus asked her if she wanted to see her mother again. 'Yes,' she replied. Then she awoke.
I didn't understand it. I began to investigate. I probed her family's religious beliefs. I wanted to see if she had been heavily indoctrinated with belief in guardian angels and tunnels to heaven.
The answer from her mother was an emphatic No.
My deepest instinct told me that nothing in Katie's experience was'taught' to her before the near drowning. Her experience was fresh, not recalled memory.
From 'Closer to the Light' by Melvin Morse.
Morse unearthed a number of other cases where he was convinced that the children's NDEs could not be explained by what they had previously read or heard - including this account by an 11-year-old:

Out of the body experience of an 11-year-old

I remember going to that hospital that day. My parents had gone into a room (the admitting office) when suddenly I heard a whooshing sound in my ears. I felt like you feel when you go over a bump in a car going real fast, and you feel your stomach drop out. I heard a buzzing sound in my ears. The next thing I knew, I was in a room, crouched in a corner of the ceiling. I could see my body below me. It was real dark, you know. I could see my body because it was lit up with a light, like there was a light bulb inside me.
I could see the doctors and nurses working on me. My doctor was there and so was Sandy, one of the nurses. I heard Sandy say, 'I wish we didn't have to do this.'
I heard a doctor say 'Stand back' and then he pushed a button on one of the paddles. Suddenly, I was back inside my body. One minute I was looking down at my face. I could see the tops of the doctors' heads. After he pushed that button, I was suddenly looking into a doctor's face.
No, I have never heard of a Near-Death Experience. I don't watch TV much. If I read, I read mostly comic books. No, I didn't tell my parents about it. I don't know why not; I guess I didn't feel like talking about it. I have never heard of anybody having this happen to them. I would not tell my friends about it. They would probably think I was crazy.
Reference:: Sikh Philosophy Network http://www.sikhphilosophy.net/showthread.php?t=32898
From 'Closer to the Light' by Melvin Morse.

The overtly Christian references in the first is not what interests me..it's how both appear to be seeing things outside their body when they were physically unconscious..
..is there some truth here or are the physicians lying?