NursePenny--> DeathBedVIsions DBV-- reaching and staring - what Dorothy did- the veil is lifting
TRANSCRIPT
# Reaching Toward the Light: What Hospice Nurses Witness at the End of Life
Every hospice nurse learns to recognize the signs that death is drawing near. Mottled skin, changes in breathing patterns, a cooling of the hands and feet, and a deepening sleep that seems to pull patients further from the world around them. These signs appear in textbooks and training manuals, neatly listed alongside clinical guidelines and comfort measures. One of the most familiar among them is a movement that many families find startling the first time they see it: the reaching.
A dying person lifts an arm toward the ceiling, toward the window, or toward some point in the room that no one else can see. Sometimes the hand opens and closes as though grasping something. Sometimes the arm stretches out with surprising strength, and the patient's gaze fixes on a spot in the air. Hospice literature acknowledges this behavior as a common sign that death is approaching. It appears in lists of end-of-life changes, usually with a brief explanation and little else.
When I began my career as a hospice nurse, I worked in a hospice house where people were dying every single day. The rhythm of the place was shaped by loss. Rooms turned over, families came and went, and the quiet hum of medical equipment marked the hours between one death and the next. In that environment, I saw reaching so often that it stopped feeling unusual. It became part of the landscape of my work, something I expected the way I expected the sound of a call light or the arrival of a volunteer with a cup of tea.
Yet the more I saw it, the more it bothered me. I wanted to understand why people were doing it. I searched through the nursing references and the palliative care texts I had brought with me from school. They described the reaching, sometimes called "picking at the air" or "plucking at the bedclothes" in related contexts, and they noted that it often accompanies confusion, restlessness, and changes in the brain as the body shuts down. Those explanations were reasonable enough, and I learned to recite them to families who asked. But they never answered the question that kept returning to me. The books explained what the body might be doing. They said nothing about what the person was seeing.
Over time, I began to notice patterns that the textbooks did not describe. Many of my patients were not simply lifting their arms into empty space. They were calling out. A woman in her eighties, weak and barely able to speak for days, would suddenly raise her hand and say a name with surprising clarity. A man who had not opened his eyes all morning would reach up, smile faintly, and whisper, "I'm coming." Sometimes the name was spoken with warmth, sometimes with relief, and occasionally with a kind of gentle impatience, as though the patient were being called to hurry along.
I started paying closer attention to those names. When the moment felt appropriate, I asked family members who the person might be. I expected a variety of answers. Some names might belong to a childhood friend, a sibling who had moved away, or a neighbor long since forgotten by everyone but the patient. What I heard instead, again and again, was the same story told in different words. The name belonged to someone who had already died. It was a mother, a husband, a brother lost in an accident decades earlier. Sometimes it was a beloved dog or cat who had waited at the door every evening for years. One daughter told me that her father had been calling for their family's old farm horse, which had died before she was born. She laughed through tears as she said it, because it made a strange kind of sense to her. He had loved that horse his whole life.
Each time I heard a name like this, my understanding shifted a little. The reaching was no longer an isolated, mechanical twitch of a failing body. It was a gesture directed toward something. The arm rose toward a presence. The voice called a name that carried
The veil is lifting and the guides are on their way
RICK ADDS- Out of all the cryonics case reports I've read, the few that I attended and from all the people in cryonics I've known many of whom were in the lab, and of all the cryonics posts I've read on Cryonet, and Cold filter and Cryonics Cafe and other publications, I never saw any reference to dying cryonics patients in hospice doing the reach, stare and call out. Cryonics, I would say, is covering this up because Nurse Penny said she sees it a lot. Someone in cryonics close to the hopsice routines in CI, Alcor or Oregon/Sparks cryonics should consider doing a hospice deathreach survey but of course everything is priiiiiiivate don't ya konw. still, an anonymous unverified report could be done if not video like on youtube lately with nightview cameras.
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