What Is a Shared-Death Experience?

Many people describe experiences like this. This article reports what people say happens and what research has and has not found, without telling you how to interpret it.

What is a shared-death experience?

The term describes an unusual experience that a living person reports at or around someone else’s death. The person may be at the bedside or far away. Raymond Moody, who coined the phrase “near-death experience” in 1975, later applied the name “shared-death experience” to these bystander accounts, and the Shared Crossing Project, founded by the therapist William Peters, has collected them since 2013. Peters has said that a hospice leader once told him these things happen all the time but are not talked about, according to a 2022 newspaper profile.

What do people actually describe?

A 2021 study by Peters and colleagues analyzed written accounts and interviews from 107 people describing 164 experiences and sorted them into four kinds, which can overlap:

• Sensing a death from a distance, such as waking at the moment a relative died or feeling that something had happened before being told.
• Witnessing unusual phenomena in the room, such as light, mist, or music.
• Feeling of accompanying the dying person, sometimes described as traveling part of the way with them.
• Feeling of assisting the dying person, the rarest kind.

A 2022 survey of 121 people in Italy, Mexico, Brazil, and Taiwan found that visual, visual-and-auditory, and felt experiences made up 74 percent of the accounts, that they occurred both in dreams and while awake, and that most happened before (47 percent) or after (39 percent) the death rather than at the moment itself.

How common are these experiences?

No one knows. The studies above are built from people who came forward to describe an experience, so they can’t say what share of bereaved people have one. The closest evidence comes from hospice staff. In a 2010 study of 38 nurses, doctors, and carers at two hospices and a nursing home, 55 percent said they had heard secondhand accounts of deathbed coincidences, which include a relative sensing a death at a distance, and 25 percent had heard of the dying person appearing surrounded by light. Those are reports of reports, as the authors note.

Who tends to have them?

Peters has said that the closeness of the relationship seems to matter, and that health care workers who felt a particular bond with a patient reported these experiences more often than those who didn’t, according to a summary of one of his talks. That observation comes from his own collection of cases.

What do researchers think causes them?

The honest answer is that the research describes, but does not explain. The authors of the 2022 survey write that experiences after a relative’s death can plausibly be understood as hallucinations prompted by emotional need, while they consider other cases, such as those involving strangers, harder to account for. Peters and Moody believe the experiences point to something beyond the body. Other researchers point to grief, expectation, the altered state of someone sitting a long vigil, and the fact that people remember the one night a dream or a feeling matched a death and forget the many nights it didn’t. None of these explanations has been tested against the others, because the accounts are retrospective and self-selected.

It’s also worth knowing that the main researchers in this field are advocates. Peters founded an organization to promote and even facilitate these experiences, and Moody has said his work convinced him of an afterlife. That doesn’t make the accounts untrue, but it is context for reading the studies.

How do people feel about them afterward?

Mostly comforted, in the studies published so far. The 2022 survey found the experiences shifted participants toward believing that consciousness survives death. The 2010 hospice study found they seemed to comfort both the dying and the bereaved. People who found an experience frightening or confusing are less likely to volunteer it to a researcher, so the picture may be incomplete.

What should I do if this happened to me?

Nothing is required. Many people keep the experience private, or tell only one trusted person. If it comforts you, that comfort is real whatever its cause. If it unsettles you, a hospice bereavement counselor will usually have heard similar accounts before; the systematic review notes a growing movement in palliative care toward listening to these experiences respectfully. See also dying people who talk to people who aren’t there and what grief is and what’s normal.

This is general educational information, not medical advice. If you are grieving and these experiences are troubling you, a grief counselor or hospice bereavement service can help. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 in the United States.