As a physician and the chief medical officer of
Hospice Buffalo, Chris Kerr has seen his patients experience end-of-life dreams and visions for nearly 30 years. Since 2010, he has led a research team that studies the phenomenon and chronicles how the visions can provide solace, meaning and healing to
both the dying and
their loved ones.
But his own first encounter came when he was 12 years old, standing at the bedside of his dying father.
William Kerr was a 42-year-old surgeon with end-stage cancer, and on that day in 1975, he reached out and ran his fingers over the buttons of his son’s jacket. The two of them had to hurry, he said; it was time to catch a plane to head up north for their fishing trip together.
Even as a boy, Kerr sensed that his father believed he was in a different place or time, far from the hospital room — and that wherever he was, he seemed peaceful there. But Kerr was quickly ushered away by a priest who said his father was “delusional.”
Twenty-four years later, now a cardiology fellow and the fifth generation of his Canadian family to practice medicine, Kerr found himself unexpectedly confronting that final memory with his dad. It was 1999, and he had answered an ad for a part-time job at Hospice Buffalo, the nonprofit hospice and palliative care organization in New York that was the first in the country to establish an integrated, freestanding campus. As Kerr made his first rounds at the inpatient unit, he immediately noticed something striking: There were 10 beds filled on the floor, he told me, “and half the patients were somewhere else.”
What he means by this — somewhere else — is that these patients were engaged with a different reality around them, interacting with people and places only they could see.
At first, he found it unsettling. But then he observed the veteran nurses.