These events took place during the final days of my mother’s life and are my experiences of being with someone who experienced Death-Bed Visions and Near Death Awareness. I have read about NDE’s and Death-Bed Phenomena for many years but these experiences have a brought the stories and research studies I have read to life.
To set the context, my mother was 79 years old and a practicing Sikh for most of her life. She had emigrated from the Punjab in India to the United Kingdom in 1960 with my father, who passed away in 1984. She also followed a spiritual saint from Northern India called ‘Maharaji Raja Sahib’ who we refer to as ‘Maharaji’ as a sign of respect. This spiritual saint died in India in 1939 – there is some brief history available at Shiri Raja Sahib Nabh Kanwal.
The events started on Sunday July 23rd 2017 when my mother was rushed into A&E at the local Infirmary due to excruciating pain. It was found that her thoracic aortic aneurysm had grown from 6.5cm from 9.5cm within the space of about four weeks. The A&E consultant said that there was a contained leak within the aneurysm and that the aneurysm could rupture within the coming week or even earlier.
On Tuesday 25th July 2017, she was in severe pain at around 20:00 when I went to visit her. When I spoke to her she said that she had heard her mother calling her earlier and said, ‘Why is she calling me – has she come to collect me?’ – her mother had died in India in 1955. We took her up to her bed and from this point to her passing away, she was never to leave her bed again.
On Saturday 29th July 2017 in the afternoon she said, ‘that they had come for her.’ One of my aunts who was with her at the time asked her ‘are you in a hurry?‘ My mother then said, ‘they’re going back now’. She said also she saw my father in the group that had come to collect her. Later in the evening she kept saying that she’d been asking to go since the morning but why was it taking so long? On Sunday 30th July 2017 in the afternoon she said she was ‘happy everything was done.’
On the morning of Monday July 31st at about 07:00 I was talking to her and at one point she looked straight passed my left shoulder and said ‘Oh, Maharaji – I didn’t see you there’. She then said ‘new suit‘ and raised her hand out as if taking hold of something from him. I immediately looked over my left shoulder but never saw anything nor felt any presence. After this she started saying it was time she went. At around 9pm that evening my mother started getting quite agitated and asking, ‘Why are they taking so long?’
On Tuesday August 1st, 2017, at around 04:00 my mother put her hands in the prayer position and looked up towards the ceiling and then around the room as if acknowledging something that neither my sister nor I could see. After this my mother slipped further downwards during the day and started to become less responsive.
On Thursday 3rd August 2017 I had to go out for a couple of hours at 16:30 and came back at 18:30 to a strange and unsettling atmosphere in the house – I can only describe it as eerily ‘heavy’ and claustrophobic with an unsettling quietness – as if there was something waiting to happen. It was as if the house had become enclosed in a bubble and no sounds from outside the house could be heard – no birds crowing or chirping, no noise from passing cars nor dogs barking. The house was also usually busy till about 8pm with extended family members visiting but everyone had left by the time I got back and there were only a few of us in the house. My mother took her last breath at 22:30 on that day.
The death bed vision followed the process documented in studies on death bed visions in that it was a guarantee of a safe passage to another place but also the harbinger of impending death for my mother. Even though it has been several years now since these events and the experiences give me comfort, they equally have me scratching my head when trying to understand them and how I integrate them into my life – it’s an on-going process which may take many years.
