Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | 155.937 KER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 155.937 KER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The first book to validate the meaningful dreams and visions that bring comfort as death nears.
Christopher Kerr is a hospice doctor. All of his patients die. Yet he has cared for thousands of patients who, in the face of death, speak of love and grace. Beyond the physical realities of dying are unseen processes that are remarkably life-affirming. These include dreams that are unlike any regular dream. Described as "more real than real," these end-of-life experiences resurrect past relationships, meaningful events and themes of love and forgiveness; they restore life's meaning and mark the transition from distress to comfort and acceptance.
Drawing on interviews with over 1,400 patients and more than a decade of quantified data, Dr. Kerr reveals that pre-death dreams and visions are extraordinary occurrences that humanize the dying process. He shares how his patients' stories point to death as not solely about the end of life, but as the final chapter of humanity's transcendence. Kerr's book also illuminates the benefits of these phenomena for the bereaved, who find solace in seeing their loved ones pass with a sense of calm closure.
Beautifully written, with astonishing real-life characters and stories, this book is at its heart a celebration of our power to reclaim the dying process as a deeply meaningful one. Death Is But a Dream is an important contribution to our understanding of medicine's and humanity's greatest mystery.
Author Notes
Christopher Kerr, MD, PhD , is the CEO and chief medical officer at Hospice Buffalo. Born and raised in Toronto, Kerr earned his MD as well as a PhD in neurobiology and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester. His research has received international attention and has been featured in The New York Times , Atlantic Monthly , and the BBC. He lives on a horse farm in the small town of East Aurora, New York.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kerr, neurobiologist and chief medical officer at Hospice Buffalo, draws on his case studies on end-of-life dreams and visions in this penetrating and empathetic debut. After a veteran hospice nurse predicted a patient's death and humbled then--cardiology fellow Kerr, he changed his career trajectory and approach to caring for dying patients. Kerr begins with his epiphany and backstory about how witnessing his father's death and a priest's callous dismissal of his father's pre-death vision pushed him toward medicine, then explains his hospice patients' pre-death dreams, visions, and life stories. Among Kerr's patients are no-nonsense Bobbie, who tests her doctors with sly and cunning humor; 95-year-old Frank, who enjoys speaking with his verbose late uncle while asleep, but often wants him to "shut up"; the imperfect, traumatized former police detective whose frightening dreams worked out his guilt and sins before he peacefully joined his late wife; and Jessica, a child dying of cancer whose mother's deceased best friend, along with Jessica's late black lab mix, visited and consoled her in her dreams. This comforting guide will reassure the dying and their loved ones while providing instructive portraits of end-of-life patients for those who work in medical and healing professions. (Feb.)
Kirkus Review
A hospice doctor with an "aversion to the supernatural" examines the experiences of patients' end-of-life dreams and visions and proposes that they have profound meaning and impact.Intrigued by his patients' nearly ubiquitous reports of healing, restorative, and closure-providing visions in the days and hours before death, Kerr, the chief medical officer for the Center for Hospice Palliative Care in Buffalo, embarked on a long-term study of these experiences, and he recounts many of them in this sympathetic and intriguing book. Readers looking for evidence of an afterlife, an eternal soul, or insight into what happens to us after death will not find it here. Instead, as the author takes pains to illustrate, it is what transpires just before death that proves to be profound and meaningful for patients and their loved ones. "These experiences simply give each patient what they need the most," Kerr writes about the dreams that are more vivid and real than any that have come before and usually boil down to feelings of genuine love: the love of a deceased dog acting as a guide into death for a dying child; the sight of a mother's arms reaching out from above an elderly woman's bed; dreams that allow a widow to relive quiet, happy moments doing crosswords with her deceased spouse. Even distressing dreams serve to work out and heal old wounds and bring peace in the final hours. While Kerr's exclusive focus on patients' words and experiencesrather than those of caregivers or researchers with their occasionally detached perspectives and potential agendasis admirable, the presentation of one case study after another, with each patient's introduction, backstory, and experiences, becomes a little tedious, and some amount of contextualizing data or further description of research findings would have been welcome. (Readers can find some of this information in the author's TEDx talk along with video footage of selected patients; watching makes a nice companion to the book.)An uplifting and reassuring work testifying to the deep restorative and spiritualthough not necessarily religiousnature of pre-death visions. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Kerr (CEO & chief medical officer at Hospice Buffalo) reveals the sense of calm and peacefulness that end-of-life dreams and visions bring to the dying. Following up on his 2014 article in an issue of the Journal of Palliative Medicine, Kerr interviewed the dying themselves, asking them how they perceived their own dreams and visions. This book also follows a 2015 TEDx Talk and a 2016 documentary on this same topic. Kerr highlights only a small handful of the more than 1,200 patients he has interviewed over the course of a decade, but these few vignettes reveal the themes prevalent in pre-death dreams. In each story, readers see both patients and their families find peace in the transition from life to death. Kerr broadly describes the end-of-life dream and visions by those unable to give consent, whether owing to dementia or reduced mental capacity. Their dreams, although different in scope, still highlight many of the same themes prevalent in others, and in the end, also helped lead to a peaceful death. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in end-of-life care and comfort for those dying and their bereaved families, without an emphasis on religion or metaphysics.--Rachel M. Minkin, Michigan State Univ. Libs., East Lansing
Excerpts
Excerpts
It is true that everyone will have come across the story of an old couple who died within days of each other. I have known many. I met people who followed their partner into death in the absence of any clear medical prognosis. We all knew that it was due to a broken heart, and that this was neither a metaphor nor a romanticized assessment. It is now established as medical fact that a real-life broken heart can lead to cardiac consequences. The medical diagnosis has a name: broken-heart syndrome, or in medical parlance, stress-induced or takotsubo cardiomyopathy. It usually happens quietly, surreptitiously, with no further ado. A broken heart best describes what happened to ninety-year-old Bernard--Benny to his loved ones-- shortly after his wife Gloria's passing. At the time of Gloria's death, Benny had been in good health. At eighty- even, he was active, gregarious, and independent, visiting a lifetime's worth of friends and family. He loved to drive, and did so daily around Buffalo, the town in which he had lived his whole life. After Gloria's precipitous death from an infection, he was inconsolable. He kept wishing for an early death, imploring God to let him rejoin his "Glo." Benny would visit the cemetery daily, sometimes up to three times a day. There, he would sit or kneel in front of Gloria's gravestone, praying and talking to her, resurrecting her in memory. When his daughter Maureen tried to dissuade him from prostrating himself, his rebuke was immediate. "To each his own," he answered. On Valentine's Day 2016, exactly two months after Gloria's passing, Benny insisted on sticking to his daily routine despite subzero temperatures. When Maureen arrived at the cemetery, she could not refrain from asking the question whose answer she knew too well: "What are you trying to do? Kill yourself?" Benny did not miss a beat: "I could only wish." This is the same man who had found it in himself to tell his dying wife that it was "okay to let go now." But it wasn't, not then, not now, not ever. On that fateful day, with temperatures plummeting to minus 15, Maureen found her father walking around Gloria's tombstone. He looked like he was going around in circles, resolute and heavy-footed as he worked his way through the snow. From a distance, she first assumed it was the cold that kept him moving, but she soon noticed that he was walking in too deliberate a pattern and was retracing his steps. As she drew closer, she saw that he had been carving a heart in the snow around her grave. Benny was usually solemn and reflective after his visits to the cemetery. Things were different that evening. He appeared breathless and uncomfortable. His status worsened over the next forty-eight hours, and by the time he was taken to the emergency room, he was critically ill. He was diagnosed with having suffered a heart attack that had been stuttering over the past few days. Benny's heart literally broke on Valentine's Day. The absence of immediate medical intervention had caused an irreversible heart condition that required hospice care. In the space of forty-eight hours, Benny had gone from being fully independent to being unable to fend for himself. He had to move in with his daughter. He could no longer visit Gloria's grave, so he began to visit her in his dreams. Or, as his daughter evocatively stated, "He is living in his dreams now." She could hear him at night, singing to his beloved Gloria in Polish, the shared language of their upbringing. This once overly social man would awake only briefly to eat, preferring to return to bed so he could close his eyes and revisit his wife. Old couples have much to teach us about true love. Their bond requires no big declarations, loyalty tests, or dramatic endings. It just needs and takes time. It unravels and infuses every fiber of their being, so much so that they cannot conceive of living without it. And so they don't. They move on through life's obstacles with the certainty of its existence. They continue to feel and believe in it even when the person through whom that love originated leaves them. For elderly patients especially, their love for their other half is who they are. Job, ambition, hobbies, mortgage, and plans have come and gone. What is left and what matters is the relationships they have maintained, cherished, and tended to through a lifetime of small gestures and greetings, loving glances and humorous words, shared stories and forgiven faults. It may be that our cultural representations of romantic love have it all wrong. Love at its best, deepest, and strongest is not about youth, impulsivity, drama, or despair. It is about constancy, patience, trust, forgiveness, and sustained acceptance. It is about letting go of the living and not letting go of the dead. Excerpted from Death Is but a Dream: Finding Hope and Meaning at Life's End by Christopher Kerr, Carine Mardorossian All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
