It is not uncommon for hospice patients to come to the end of their lives and claim to have visitors who have passed years earlier. For example, a patient may engage in a conversation with a sibling that can’t be seen and that we know has been deceased for several years. Sometimes patients point out their visitors to others and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes patients share that the deceased visitors bring a message of “going home” or “coming to get them” and sometimes they don’t.

I can remember being a new Christian and finding a need in my church for the visitation of our elderly and shut-in members. I was about 19 years old when I made my first hospital visit in this ministry and I can remember sitting down in among empty chairs in the hospital room and having the patient introduce me to her deceased husband, who apparently I sat next to. I couldn’t see him, and the patient even mentioned that he had died years ago but he came back to “take her with him.”

It was unsettling for me as that was the first time I had experienced something like that. Was it a ghost? Was she hallucinating? Was this actually how the transition to the afterlife worked? Of course, as a hospital and hospice chaplain this is an experience that I have since been around hundreds of time, and here in this post I want to address some things that I often consider when I am around this occurrence.

First, I have no reason to definitively claim that the deceased visitors are real or not. I typically avoid affirming their presence as much as I avoid denying their presence. Sometimes I am asked by the patient, “Do you believe me?” and I will respond that I do believe them. I believe that what they are experiencing is real to them and I want to honor that. My personal rule is to keep my opinion and beliefs to myself, unless I am specifically asked or blogging on my website.

Second, I know that the Bible doesn’t support the idea that deceased loved ones can come back from the dead. I know that at death the body returns to the ground (Psalm 146:3-4) and the spirit returns to God (Ecclesiastes 12:7) and the deceased await the Lord’s return and the resurrection of the saved or the resurrection of the unsaved (John 5:28-29). I also know that Jesus referred to death as sleep (John 11:11-14) because the deceased are not active or conscience (Ecclesiastes 9:5).

This is just my personal understanding of Scripture and I have never felt the need to push it on a family or patient experiencing deceased visitors. In my mind I think it is unlikely that the patient is dealing with their loved one in reality, but I do not see how this occurrence does any harm to the dying patient.

I tend to think it is likely that deceased visitors are hallucinations caused by a combination of imagination, pain medication, and the progressive dying process. In our illness we spend a great deal of time lying down and thinking. There is a pretty good chance that thinking about our loved ones is high on that list. To me, it is not a far stretch to express those thoughts through imagination and hallucination, especially when you’re on medications and dying.

For me, I see this occurrence as being similar to dreams. We often find that our dreams at night are merely amalgamations of our various thoughts from the day. Since every experience of our life is cataloged in our brain it does not seem impossible to me that someone can draw from a memory and project it into their current state of reality, which is already not too sound when you factor in pain meds and the dying process.

The bottom line is that deceased visitors are very real to the patients even if we are certain that they are just seeing things. And in that, I don’t sense a need to correct them or even give a theological discourse.