Shadows

Elderly care is often a very sensitive topic. Indian films have made the palliative care look like a cruel deed. In reality for certain illnesses, managing the patients at home is not possible simply because we do not know the techniques to overpower the patient. Understanding the ailment and managing the patient at home not only becomes difficult but also it becomes inconvenient towards the patient itself. In such cases there is no option but to place the patient in the palliative or elderly care.

While patients are cared for in the rehabilitation or the retirement home facilities, the experiences around the death of the patient are often chilling. The patients, they themselves experience out of the world senses. Sometimes their caregiver too experience these unbelievable elements. One of such commonly experienced elements is seeing the shadows.

When the patients are on their death bed there is an obvious deterioration of their physical health. The patients mentally state too gets affected because of their underlying conditions. Despite that the experiences that are narrated by the patients and their caregivers still remain believable because they remain consistent across multiple patients and multiple facilities.

Friend of mine used to work at a palliative care centre especially designed for elderly patients who had breathing ailments such as asthma or copd which were progressive and beyond treatment. One of the patients on the death bed had mentioned to her that they had seen shadows around them. The experience was that they had seen the shadow of a person moving around the room as if they had entered through the door and escape through the window. The patient had also mentioned that the shadow moved around the bed of the patient before escaping through the window. It was just a shadow without any person. My friend earlier decided to ignore it. However her seniors told her that it could be a sign that the patients may depart this world very soon.

My friend initially was hesitant to believe this theory. She read more about this phenomenon and could find several evidences. It had been documentated in medical journals that the patients on death bed before dying often experience visuals of shadows around them. She decided to speak with the patient to get more details around what they had been experiencing. The patient mentioned that they had been seeing the shadow around the same time for past couple of days. My friend decided to stay with the patient when the shadow would miraculously appear. What she saw definitely changed her entire believe system.

My friend sat in the room where the patient was. She herself witnessed that a shadow appeared from the closed door and circled the patient. After circling the patient the shadow escape through a closed window. My friend tried to chase the shadow but she could never see where it disappeared. This told my friend that the shadow was not the patients illusion but it was the reality.

It was her first patient in the palliative care however she had similar experience with other patients as well. She did see the presence of the shadow in the patients room near the time of their death. The shadow served as a herbinger of bearing the news of the death to the patient. She had no other option than believing what she had seen herself, the medical journals, and the experiences from her seniors.

Sometimes it makes us believe that everyone is equal im the eyes of death. Everyone finally gets united at the death. The living experience could be different but the experiences around the death remain identical.