"For me it's seeming to be involved a lot with connections, if I were to use a single word — our connectivity and oneness with others and a higher power."

In his recent book, "Palliative Care Perspectives," Dr. James L. Hallenbeck calls the experience patients report of seeing dead loved ones an "altered state" of consciousness, comparing it to how we think about radio frequencies. Hallenbeck is director of palliative care services with the V.A. Palo Alto Health Care System.

"In normal wakefulness, we function and interact on a relatively narrow and shared frequency that allows both transmission and reception of shared experiences. When patients at the end of life experience altered states, it is as if their radio frequency, their wavelength, has shifted," with the radio dial turned slightly.

That small turn "allows the patient to experience both the 'normal' wavelength on which we coexist and yet receive signals on a wavelength that we cannot perceive. Such a patient might be perfectly aware of being in a hospital bed and of dying but be able to see and hear a deceased relative sitting in a chair next to the bed."

Often the only clues that doctors, nurses or family members have that a "frequency shift" has occurred is to see the patient "speaking or gesturing in an indicative way or the patient reporting on the experience after returning to our wavelength. At this point I must stress that in discussing such altered states, I am not commenting on whether the late Aunt Edna is really sitting next to the dying patient, that is, whether such altered states are real.

"The point is, they are experienced as real. This shifting of wavelengths may seem fantastic, but, in fact, we experience such states every night when we dream."

He writes that patients most commonly see deceased relatives. "It is remarkable how frequent an occurrence this is — estimated to occur before at least 25 percent of deaths. Also remarkable is the fact that virtually always the relatives are, in fact, dead; visits by otherwise unseen living relatives are rare."

Hallenbeck said the next most frequent visitors, in his experience, are "guardian beings, angels and others. . . . Often, they will communicate to the patient that their time (to die, to crossover) has not yet come or some similar message. I have noticed no correlation between the appearance of such beings and religiosity in patients."

Usually, such visitors are welcomed, he writes, though one devout atheist patient of his was an exception. "When angels appeared in his room, he screamed, 'Get out of here, there is no God!' "

Hammargren believes that death is a transition, just like childbirth, when "you have all these loving people anticipating your birth and anxiously awaiting your arrival."

Though she said she'll be "the last person in the world to tell you where we come from or where we go" after death, she's watched thousands of people die and believes "that we go somewhere and someone who loves us helps us go. This idea that you come by yourself and leave by yourself — we have people who love and cherish us as they welcome us, and it's the same when we leave here."

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