Abstract
William Peters’ At heaven’s door: What shared journeys to the afterlife teach about dying well and living better is a fascinating description of shared dying experiences (SDE). They define these as “experiences that occur when an individual feels that they have somehow shared in a dying person’s transition from this life to whatever lies beyond” (p.233). These experiences can occur either when the other person is present or physically distant from the dying person. Peters found four distinct modes of participation.
The first mode is sensing where the individual remotely experiences a sense of transition. In the second mode, witnessing—the most common mode—there is a vision of the dying person followed by other phenomena such as light or nonhuman entities or other such events. The third mode is labeled accompanying. Here individuals recount accompanying the dying person at least to some sort of a boundary that the living person could not pass. Finally in assisting, the living individual had some role in assisting the transition. Most of these experiences were positive—lessening grief or reinforcing beliefs in some form of afterlife. However, as common in other extraordinary experiences at life’s end, a small number viewed the experience negatively. Most of these were situations when the stories were shared but negatively viewed or derided by others.
Peters is to be commended for identifying SDE as another type of extraordinary experience at life’s end. At the very least, the book is a fascinating read. My criticisms of the book are two-fold. First, while research is said to be underlying the work, the methodology is never delineated. Second, there is little reference (and no bibliography) that relates this to the larger and emerging literature on end-of-life phenomena. Nonetheless, by defining shared dying experiences, the author (with Michael Kinsella) may encourage further study of these experiences.