Linguist and historian Michael Erard ponders the challenge of staying close to dying loved ones when they are delirious:

This dissonance between the idealized notion of dying speech, based on people’s expectations and cultural ideals, and the reality of final moments so often complicates our understanding of death. And when delirium enters the equation, the gap between expectation and reality widens even further.

“The Hallucinatory Thoughts of the Dying Mind,” February 10, 2025.

His essay at MIT Press Reader is adapted from his new book, Bye Bye I Love You (MIT Press 2025). But curiously, his own grandmother’s last contact with him did not seem so much to be delirium or hallucinatory thoughts as simply a different cultural understanding from his:

The gray skies on our visit to the hospital will be forever seared in my memory. When my wife and I entered my grandmother’s room, I told her who I was. Her eyelids fluttered open, and her eyes focused on me, her gaunt face lit up, she reached out her arms, I hugged and kissed her. “Michael-Jean, you’re an angel!” she exclaimed. “You’re an angel!”

At first I was concerned — does she know it’s me, not an angel? Apparently so, she said my name, then repeated joyfully, “You’re an angel, you’re an angel.” Delirium? Maybe. But when your beloved grandmother calls you an angel, you reach for the interpretation that feels most loving. That has to be her talking, she’s still there. She said what she said; the words, they’re right there, her last ones, as far as I’m concerned. She became unresponsive shortly after and died two days later.

My father remembers this differently. He maintains that she roused to a saying of the Lord’s Prayer. But I won’t argue — from both of our stories, we end up with some morsels of closure, and that’s what feeds us. The Dying Mind”

The sense of a greater reality is comparatively common among people who are dying, even if they have not been lucid for some time. In our forthcoming book, The Immortal Mind (Worthy June 3, 2025), neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I discuss a number of such cases, which are beginning to receive more attention.

For example, Australian palliative care doctor Will Cairns notes that one of his patients, dying at home, was unresponsive for two days while his son was traveling to see him. But when the son arrived, “he woke up to talk with him for several hours. Then he became unresponsive again, and died a few hours later.” Cairns offers several other examples here.

In any event, medical research into these passages of life is only just beginning.