Visions of the Departed

© 1997, Dennis Gersten, M.D. Excerpted with permission from ARE YOU GETTING ENLIGHTENED OR LOSING YOUR MIND? A Spiritual Program for Mental Fitness (Harmony, a Division of Crown Books, May 1997) This excerpt may not be reprinted without written permission from Harmony Books.


Approximately 105 million Americans believe they have had messages from dead people or visions of them, and in many cultures, visitations from the dead are an expected and normal part of the grieving process. All Hopi Indian widows receive visitations from their deceased husbands, who return in order to complete unfinished business. If the marriage was peaceful and well-adjusted, the husband visits a few times and then leaves for good. If the marriage was conflicted, the spirit of the husband visits frequently and the experience is emotionally-upsetting.

A patient of mine who is a Lutheran Minister, tells me the following story. Reverend Paul Thomas routinely consoles grief-stricken parishioners. On one occasion he was consoling the mother of a young man who had suffered an epileptic seizure. As they sat on a couch outside the emergency room where her son was being treated, the young man's mother suddenly gasped and said to Paul, "Did you see that?"
"Did I see what?"
"Did you see my son?
His spirit just walked out of the operating room . . . hand-in-hand with the spirit of his deceased father (Steve's father had died six years previously). They both looked so happy, so content, so full of light. Steve and his father smiled at me and then walked away together." Reverend Thomas hadn't seen it, but he certainly believed she had. Moments later, the emergency room doors swung open, and the surgeon sadly told them that her son had just died...


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