My wife is here

Used to do hospice home care. People who are actively dying see shit. Thing is it’s almost ALWAYS friends or family who have passed before, angels or demons. Never, like, a random dog. Or a kid they never met. Or a plate of spaghetti.

The rational explanation: It’s cultural. Even if you’re not a believer, everyone hears stories about white light and beckoning relatives and anegls and demons. So that’s what people see when their oxygen levels drop and their bodies are shutting down and they start hallucinating.

The explanation that scares the fuck out of me: someone with one foot in this world and one in the next can see things I can’t. The scariest one was a man who seemed TOTALLY LUCID. Normally dying people don’t make tons of sense and will occasionally say something like “My son is here, do you see him?” and then back to nonsense. This guy was otherwise in his right mind – except he was telling me about his wife who was sitting at the end of his bed. And she had dyed her hair again, despite him always liking her natural grey, but at least she had on that blue dress she always looked so good in. He had a perfectly rational conversation with her about how he missed her but the doctors said he would see her soon and not to worry, he wasn’t scared, he knew he was a very old man and no one lives forever.

Part of me thinks he was just having a different experience of death/hallucination. Part of me thinks he was fucking with me. Part of me believes she was there, I just couldn’t see her because I’m not dying.

I always worried one day I WOULD be able to see what they saw? What then, huh?