What shared journeys to the afterlife teach about dying well and living better [PODCAST]

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“The more I spoke with individuals who had experienced a shared crossing event, the more I also noticed repeating patterns. A woman in West Virginia and a woman in Australia with deeply similar experiences around the loss of a baby. A grown daughter in California and a grown daughter in Pennsylvania; a woman in Alabama and a man in Spain. None had met, yet each spoke a common language. Again and again, I found that this moment of shared connection that they had experienced also changed their lives and how they chose to live them in unexpected ways. It provided insight. It provided closure. It made end-of-life decisions easier. It eased grief.”

William Peters is a grief and bereavement therapist and author of At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach About Dying Well and Living Better.

He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “What shared journeys to the afterlife teach about dying well and living better.”

Reflect and earn 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 CME for this episode.

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have William Peters. He is a licensed psychotherapist, and he’s the author of the book At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach About Dying Well and Living Better. There’s an excerpt from that book on KevinMD. William, welcome to the show.

William Peters: Thanks for having me, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your book and excerpt in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

William Peters: Yeah. You know, when I look at how I got into being a researcher and a clinician focused on individuals who have these extraordinary end-of-life experiences around death and dying particularly, it’s a very personal journey for me, because you don’t grow up thinking you’re going to work with people around death and dying.

So I actually had a near-death experience at 17 years old: a high-speed skiing accident in a valley right outside Lake Tahoe. It crushed my spine, and in that moment, I was catapulted away from my body. I was very peaceful, with no real issues about pain at all, and I was moving through this beautiful universe. I could see planet Earth in the distance, and I had a life review up to my 17 years there. And then I ran into this, and I mean that quite directly: I saw this light in the distance, and I knew I was dying. At that moment, I realized I did not want to die, and I ended up pleading with this source, which I call God, to come back. I came back, as you can tell, but I didn’t think about that experience for 10 years. And I think your viewers know this is a classic near-death experience, now well understood, with a good deal of research and science in terms of validating that it happens under trauma and stress.

So here I am with a spinal injury, now chronic pain, difficulty walking, and my life takes a completely different trajectory. I ended up going to Central and South America, working with underprivileged populations primarily. But it was there that I had my first exposure to what I’d call pre-modern cultures, and working with indigenous people, I really got a sense for this notion that these people could move in and out of this human experience into other dimensions. And it matched what I knew from my near-death experience, so I was very open to it.

But I returned home to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as a social worker in San Francisco, and the AIDS epidemic essentially breaks out in the late ’80s, early ’90s throughout San Francisco. I’m a social worker in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, a real skid row part of town, and here I am working with many young men who are dying of AIDS. And what they’re telling me in my clinical office is about when they’re with their brothers who are dying. Keep in mind, every person I was working with who had contracted HIV knew they had a death sentence, and so they would gather up as a community, often ostracized. And then they would come and see me for psycho-emotional support, and they would share these experiences, primarily something like this, which is the feature or the focus of my book: a shared death experience. Essentially: “Here I am. I’ve gathered around somebody who’s dying.” This is a group of people, and they say, “I feel like I shared in this journey with the dying person into a benevolent afterlife.”

One experience in particular I’ll share, because it’s so profound. This is a gentleman, Brad, who was kind of elderly, older than most of the people in his community, so he would have been around many, many deaths and was quite adept at caring for the dying. He comes in one morning exhausted, and I say, “Brad, what is going on?” He said, “Well, last night Randy died.” I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” And he says, “Yeah, but it was so beautiful.” And I said, “Beautiful? Tell me.” And he describes this experience where the brothers, as he calls them, the community of young men, mostly gathered around Randy’s bed. And as Randy dies, he rises out of his body, and he goes up through a cylinder of light, and he looks back at all the caregivers there, and he looks at them and says, “Thank you. Thank you for caring for me.” And what Brad reported is he was younger, he was healthy, he was healed, and then he moved up that light and disappeared.

So, long story short, these experiences I had first there. Then I had another near-death experience with idiopathic thrombocytopenia in the intensive care unit. I floated above my body for a number of hours, and then a doctor came in, the hematologist came in, in the wee hours of the morning. He taps on my hand. Of course, he’s tapping on a body that I don’t even know is mine. It isn’t until he calls out my name and says, “Mr. Peters, Mr. Peters,” that I realized, “Oh my gosh, that’s me in the bed.” And I then answer him, and as I answer him, I fill in my body. I literally went from the perspective of seeing this doctor from above, looking at his crown, and then, as I talk to him and answer him, I’m looking at him through my eyes into his face. So this is another type of out-of-body experience and near-death experience.

And then I worked in hospice, a very progressive hospice in San Francisco, Zen Hospice Project, and it was there that I had a number of shared death experiences. One in particular was with a gentleman named, we’ll call him, Ron. Ron is dying. He has been unresponsive for a couple of weeks. I’ve been reading to him every afternoon that I’m there. The reason why is we know that hearing is the last sense to go in a dying process. I’m reading to him, and all of a sudden, I pop out of my body, and I am suspended above my body and Ron’s body, which is prone in his bed. I look to my right, and there is Ron. I see his face. I see him smiling. He’s looking at me as if to say, “Check this out. Here we are, above our physical bodies down below, communicating up here.” And I’m comfortable with this, because I’ve had other experiences.

I returned to my body some time later, and I discussed this with the supervisor on our ward, who I loved and felt very comfortable with. He’d been a veteran of hospice work; his name was Eric. And I said, “Eric, this is my experience. It just happened.” And it is the Zen Hospice Project, so he is very Buddhist, and he says, “William, phenomena rolling by. Let it go.” And this is a very important comment by Eric, because this is kind of the casual dismissal of these very profound end-of-life experiences.

So I would have many more of these experiences, but it wasn’t until 2009 when I met Dr. Raymond Moody. He, of course, is the primary researcher, the person who brought the near-death experience into public consciousness with his 1975 book, Life After Life. Well, he’s talking at a conference, and he’s not talking about the near-death experience now; he’s talking about the shared death experience. And when I hear that, I say, for the first time, I realize there is a name, a label, for this experience that I’ve had many times, and that I’ve had many clients, primarily when I was a social worker, who have had. So when I hear this, I basically tell Raymond, “I want to study this. I want to research this. I think I know how we can help people have this experience.”

And why would you want to have this experience? Well, for the reasons that I mentioned earlier; Brad detailed the power of this experience. You have a sense that your deceased loved one is alive and well in a benevolent afterlife. You have a sense that you’ll see them again. Your relationship to death and dying is transformed from one of fear and anxiety to one of wonder and curiosity and acceptance, in a certain way, like it’s not something to be feared anymore. And then I noticed, as a grief psychotherapist, that people’s grief processes are much different when they’re able to welcome these experiences into their life, work with them, and make their own meaning of them. But the key is for them to know that these are experiences that happen, that they’re normal, and that they’re actually gifts.

So my book goes into 28 stories and clinical responses to them as well. Some have clinical responses, not all of them; most of them are just stories, actually. But you’ll see, as I wind through, how these experiences are quite common, and far more common than, certainly, our health care providers know.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned that you specialize in grief and bereavement psychotherapy. Tell me, how does your shared death experience influence your counseling and practice?

William Peters: Yeah, thank you. I think the most important influence of my own experiences with the shared death experiences and the near-death experience is that I know these experiences are real. They are not neuroses. They are not hallucinations. They are not delusions. They are not bouts of psychosis. Too often, my clients will come to me saying that they did not have a positive experience, particularly in a health care setting, or sometimes also with spiritual care, which doesn’t understand what they went through. So they look at them as if to doubt.

So the point being here is that somebody has a shared death experience. They’re with a loved one; they’re going through a major loss. Yes, there’s some stress, for sure, but they realize that they’ve just had this experience that’s so profound and so meaningful, and they want to share it. But they’re also wondering, “Hey, am I,” you know, it’s an altered state of sorts, “am I making this up?” Well, that first interaction, especially with health care providers, is very important. And oftentimes what we see in our literature is that people express feeling dismissed, discounted, and in some cases disparaged.

And so this is why, as a clinician and in my work, I am very welcoming to people to explore these experiences. Now, of course, I’m going to do a mental status exam. I’m going to get a sense for whether this person perhaps has some psycho-emotional issues that may be influencing their experience. But by and large, I don’t find that in the people who come to see me. And so, as a clinician, I’m both knowledgeable about these experiences, I help people assess, I affirm them, and I help people integrate them in this way, by deepening into their experience. And the integration process is a meaning-making experience. I don’t have any sense of what’s really happening here, no religion or spiritual interpretation or cosmology. I work with the client to make sense of the experience for themselves, and then work through the transformations in their life that this type of experience usually beckons.

Kevin Pho: And you mentioned that there’s some research surrounding the shared death experience. So what are some of the main studies that are out there about shared death?

William Peters: Yeah. So my research institute, the one that I direct, which is the Shared Crossing Research Initiative, published the first dedicated study on the shared death experience. It was published in December of 2021 in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. What was interesting about this was the reviewers were almost giddy in their commentary, which, as you know, you don’t get from peer-reviewed articles or journals very often. But what we heard was, one reviewer in particular said, “Thank you so much for doing this research. Those of us who work in palliative hospice care know that these experiences happen, but we’ve never been able to do a robust scholarly study.”

My team is multidisciplinary. I’m a psychotherapist, so I’m the one who brings in most of the clients, or they’re not clients, usually. They come to me, and then I vet them, and then they become research participants. We also have a medical director, Dr. Monica Williams; she’s an ER physician. And we also have Dr. Michael Kinsella, and he’s a PhD in religion and cognitive sciences. So we have this really broad-based team that can work with this process to instill that we have the integrity and the academic rigor necessary to produce a quality study, which we have.

Our first study, the one I just mentioned, has 143 deeply analyzed cases, and so I created the first typology for the shared death experience. That’s a longer discussion, but keep in mind that the shared death experience can happen at bedside in about one-third of our cases, and two-thirds, 64 percent, will happen remotely. So you can be doing your life somewhere else, and all of a sudden, you can have this type of profound experience where you feel like you’re sharing in this journey to a benevolent afterlife.

And what that means, Kevin, in the most common feature, is seeing the dying on this journey, and oftentimes seeing elevated non-human beings that they often call guides or angels, or just elevated helpers in this process. And then, of course, you see deceased relatives about 13 percent of the time. So it’s really this profound journey that they get to participate in, which is very affirming to the experiencer.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to William Peters. He’s a licensed psychotherapist, and he’s the author of the book At Heaven’s Door: What Shared Journeys to the Afterlife Teach About Dying Well and Living Better. William, what are some of the major takeaways that you want your readers to come away with after reading your book?

William Peters: Yeah, I want my readers, and particularly those who work in health care and spiritual care, to know that these experiences do indeed happen, and that we need to assess for them as health care providers. I would like to get health care measures in to really ask, “Hey, did you have any exceptional or profound experiences around the death of your loved one?” Because this opens the door for people to begin a really profound healing process, a transformational process as well, around death. Rather than the typical response of pushing death away, these experiences actually invite curiosity about what is happening with this great event of human death.

And generally speaking, the mission of the Shared Crossing Project is to transform people’s relationship to death and dying through raising awareness about these experiences. And I always say the best way to get information out about these experiences is to talk to your trusted loved ones. Because when you hear a third party talk about it, even me, you might say, “Well, this guy, I don’t know where he comes from.” But these are so common; people just don’t share them. So I want readers to know that these are normal, healthy events, and they’re gifts, and to talk about them. Let’s bring these experiences, these deeply spiritual and meaningful experiences, into our living rooms, into our communities. Let’s talk about these.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: We ask you for some pieces of advice and wisdom that you could leave with my clinician audience listening to this.

William Peters: Yeah, I think the real advice I would say is, get curious about the spiritual experiences that happen to our clients and patients at the end of life. So much of what we do in our health care professions, across the board, in mental health, is we look for things that are pathological or incorrect and try to resolve them. Well, I advocate for inquiring about these spiritual experiences, which actually will yield better grief and bereavement processes and will generally lead to better overall health.

Kevin Pho: William, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

William Peters: Thank you, Kevin.

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