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Near Death Experiences: Can you foresee the death of a loved one... and choose the exact moment you die?

Intensive care nurse Penny Sattori has spent years investigating. Here, she reveals the stories of those who have foreseen the death of relatives - and how we may be able to control the timing of our own deaths too!

Four years ago, children’s author Shelley E. Parker suddenly had a strong premonition that her fiancé was about to die. This made no sense at all. If anyone was going to die, it was more likely to be Shelley herself, as she was seriously ill with cancer.
But that night in hospital, her premonition was reinforced by a bizarre dream in which she met God.
She recalled every moment of it when she woke: how God had told her that it was time for Steven to go, and turned down her plea to take her instead.

At noon the next day, Steven, who was a helicopter pilot, was killed in a crash.
‘I now wonder whether I could have stopped him dying if I’d told him,’ says Shelley, 41, who lives in Farnworth, Lancashire. ‘But I don’t think I could have.’
There was no doubt in Shelley’s mind that she’d somehow tuned in to the future.

Ten years before, she’d had another premonition — this time about a little girl. The healthy three-year-old was the child of friends and Shelley had seen her only a few times. One night, she had a ‘very vivid’ dream about her.
‘I was walking along a path and in front of me was this little girl with her auntie,’ Shelley recalled. ‘I’m not sure how accurate the image of the auntie was, as I’d never met her or seen photographs of her — I just knew that she’d died about 20 years previously.
'She smiled and telepathically told me all was well'
'The aunt said she was there to take the little girl to heaven. The child was dressed in pink and had a pink bucket and spade and glitter make-up on the side of her face. She was very happy and dancing around.
'I woke up the next day and felt really unsettled. I thought about phoning the little girl’s father but then thought better of it, trying to rationalise that it was just a dream. That feeling of anxiety lasted all day.’
That evening, Shelley went to dinner with relatives. At one point, she glanced at her watch. It was 10.10pm.
‘Suddenly, all of the unsettled feeling and anxiety just fell away and I thought: at last I’m starting to relax.’
The next day, she learned that the little girl had died the night before — soon after 10pm. The cause of her death was a mystery.

Consider the case of Janice Wright, a British woman who was visiting friends in Virginia, USA. In the middle of the night, she’d suddenly snapped wide awake.

In her bedroom was her childhood nanny, whom she hadn’t seen in years, though they still corresponded.
‘In real life, she was well over 80,’ said Janice. ‘But in the vision, she was ageless and surrounded by an immensely bright light. She smiled at me, put her hand out and telepathically told me all was well.
‘I was shocked and stayed awake. The next morning, I told my hosts I thought my old nanny had died.
‘Later that day, a cousin called from England to tell me that’s exactly what had happened.’

How can we explain such accurate premonitions? Science has not even begun to find answers.

Similarly, no scientific theory has yet come close to explaining why a few people have near-death experiences — which can include visions of tunnels, bright lights and meetings with dead relatives.
the extraordinary phenomenon known as ‘shared death experience’.
This is admittedly rare, but two separate cases have been reported  by relatives who were present at a deathbed.
The first took place in 2004 in the north of England. A dying woman in her 70s was unconscious in a hospital, with her family around her bed. Her husband, Peter, and son, Harry, were holding her hands, and her daughter, Gail, had placed a hand on her forehead.
According to Peter, he suddenly noticed a bright light a little distance away. As he watched, a tall man stepped forward from the light with his hands outstretched. Then his unconscious wife seemed to rise from her bed and walk towards the man.
‘He was waiting there as if to give her a welcoming hug; there was a sense of peace and love,’ Peter recalled.
His daughter, Gail, appears to have had a fuller experience of the same vision. ‘All of a sudden, I could see Mum walking into the distance on a path,’ she said. ‘Around her head was like a sun, and on her right-hand side, I could see the silhouette of some people.
‘[Then] I saw this tall person — I don’t know who he was. When she reached him, he took her into his arms as if in a warm embrace that was full of love.
‘Mum’s breaths got shallower. And then there were no further breaths and the scene disappeared.’

Naturally, the family was devastated at their loss.
In the second case, a woman in her 40s called Laura was holding her mother’s hand as she started slipping into a coma. Then, suddenly, Laura said, her mother rose from her bed and began walking away. After just one pace, though, she turned around.
‘She looked so happy and well,’ said Laura. ‘Then she said: “Go back now — it’s not your turn.”’
When Laura next looked at her mother on the bed, she was in a deep coma. She died three days later, without regaining consciousness.
What makes them particularly fascinating is that they can’t simply be dismissed by cynics as the product of a malfunctioning brain.
Why? Because, unlike conventional near-death experiences, they happen to people who aren’t close to death themselves.

Sometimes, a patient is able to describe his vision before dying. A hospice nurse in Wales spoke about a 65-year-old man, Ernest, who kept seeing people he knew to be dead at his bedside.
The medical team put this down to hallucinations and reduced his medication — but it made no difference. The figures kept appearing.
In the end, the hospice staff seemed more concerned about them than he was. According to Ernest, he felt no fear yet knew perfectly well that his visitors signified approaching death.
Older generations, who had far more experience of seeing loved ones die at home, often knew all about death-bed visions and what they signified. Indeed, they have been documented since Victorian times.
More recently, in the 1970s, death-bed visions were the subject of a large survey conducted in both the U.S. and India. This concluded that patients usually died within two to five days of the start of a vision.


Numerous reports by healthcare workers have recorded other bizarre phenomena, including the stopping of clocks
Other research suggests that such visions result in a peaceful acceptance of death — whereas drug-induced hallucinations tend to cause anxiety or confusion.
Numerous reports by healthcare workers have recorded other bizarre phenomena, including: a change in temperature, a light around the body, the malfunctioning of electrical equipment and the stopping of clocks. There have also been incidents of glasses smashing — without human intervention — at the moment of death.
Some patients actually have control over the timing of their deaths.
There was an elderly woman called Jean Hunt. She’d been suffering from heart failure and her husband had visited her religiously every day for a week.
Unused to being separated from Jean, who’d been chronically ill for ten years, he was very anxious. But, that morning, her condition was stable so he’d been persuaded to accompany his mother on a day trip.
An hour after he left the ward, Jean’s blood pressure suddenly began to drop. She died not long afterwards.
That’s when it occurred that Jean may have chosen her time of death. Many patients die while their families were taking ‘a quick break’.
Sam, was in his 80s. His family had been with him almost constantly for a week, and one day they had a break in the canteen. It was 2pm and they’d been keeping vigil since 8am.
Within minutes of their departure, Sam was dying.

Why would anyone deliberately choose to die alone?

It may be that love is sometimes the only thing keeping a seriously-ill patient alive — and the absence of loved ones makes it easier to let go.

Hospice and palliative-care consultant Dr John Lerma has reported that 70 to 80 per cent of his patients waited for their loved ones to leave the room before dying.

Some patients, on the other hand, appear to be waiting for a specific event to take place before they can permit themselves to die. This could be a wedding or birthday, or the arrival of an estranged family member.

Whatever our beliefs, we should keep an open mind. And when death comes — as it must — it may not be as fearful as we imagine...

Sources; Dr Penny Sartori,  DailyMail