S2E38: PREVIEW: Ask Me Anything with Dr. Christopher Kerr

In this special preview of a subscriber-exclusive Ask Me Anything, hospice physician and end-of-life researcher Dr. Christopher Kerr returns to answer listeners’ most burning questions about what happens as we die. Dr. Kerr shares what he has witnessed after decades at the bedside: why dying may be less frightening than we imagine, how end-of-life dreams and visions can bring comfort and healing, whether loved ones can still hear us in their final moments, and why some experiences at the end of life continue to challenge what we think we know about consciousness. To hear the full conversation — and access upcoming AMA episodes with Ky and our Season Two guests — subscribe to The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass. You’ll also get ad-free episodes, bonus content, and access to our private community. Visit www.thetelepathytapes.com/backstagepass http://www.thetelepathytapes.com/backstagepass to sign up today. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

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• 0:42Ky Dickens?

  The sessions are private, personalized, and gives you access to gifted healers from all over the world. Whether you're looking for support with stress, pain, sleep challenges, mood shifts, hormone changes, digestive issues, emotional well-being, or you're simply ready to operate at a higher level, the benefits are real. If you're already a believer like we are, and you're finally ready to try it for yourself, Luminara is offering 10% off your first session for Telepathy Tapes listeners. Just go to luminara.care. That's luminara.care and use code TAPES10 at checkout for 10% off your first session. Hey, everyone, it's Kai, and I'm so happy to share this very special backstage AMA with you. After our episode with Dr. Christopher Kerr, we received so many thoughtful and deeply

• 1:22Ky Dickens?

  personal questions from listeners about death, dying, hospice, end-of-life visions, and what it means to be present with someone we love as they transition. Dr. Kerr's work has moved so many of us because he brings such dignity, humanity, and scientific care to a subject our culture often avoids. As a hospice physician and researcher, he spent decades sitting at the bedside of people at the end of life, listening closely to what they experience, their dreams and visions, fears, and maybe most importantly, moments of healing that can arise as the body begins to fail. In this conversation, our producer Selena sits down with Dr. Kerr to ask your questions. Here's a clip from that episode.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Welcome, Dr. Christopher Kerr. Thanks so much for taking the time today. And did you get a chance to look over some of these questions?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Yes, I did. They're incredible.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, some really interesting ones. Well, let's just get right into it then. So the first question says, Dear Dr. Kerr, thank you for the fantastic episode. I'm curious about how often you've encountered cases where someone who is not dying, like a family member, caregiver, or clinician, sitting in the room, also sees or senses what the dying person is seeing. A friend recently described experiencing this when her father passed away, and I'm curious if you've seen such things. If you have, how do you understand them?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I certainly hear about it after the fact. And there's a gentleman in California who, it's called the Shared Crossings Project, and really gathered a lot of data around this, and people describing that certainly you hear cases all the time, people see orbs and all of that. But we've had a couple of unusual experiences, one I'll absolutely never forget, actually two, and they both involved children. And it was a family where there were several women, they're sisters, who had had miscarriages. And it's not uncommon for women who have lost children to see their children. And that was true of this patient. And in the room were her sisters.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  And one of the little granddaughters came in and pointed and said, look at all the babies. That's one case that I'll never forget.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  What was the other story?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of a shared experience. It's something that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was a remarkable woman who I was very fond of, very creative, very artistic. She was also a musician, and she was very fond of a piano teacher she had when she was a child. So every day you'd go around on her, and she was having dreams from her childhood, and her teacher was often there playing music, etc. And I'll never forget, on the middle of the week, she starts having dreams about a car accident.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  But she didn't understand them. Why am I having dreams about a car accident? And I left her on a Friday and I I knew she was going to pass over the weekend. And I came in on a Saturday morning, I happened to run into the nurse and I said, did she pass? And she said, yeah, but did you hear what happened? I said, no. She said, her son was driving there that morning and had a fatal car accident. So she had been dreaming of a car accident that somebody dies in. And she can't understand it. And this was like, kind of on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. And then she dies midday on the Saturday and her son died that morning in a car accident.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  You know, don't know what to say. In that category of the unexplained, that's one that I'll always, I'll never quite understand.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Does it change your relationship to death? Obviously, it's a tragedy, a son dying. But given your experience working day in and day out with this, do you have a different approach to it now than you did maybe before?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Day and night.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  And more so the older I get, I think, the longer I've done this. But yeah, I always say, I just think there's a better story than the one we imagine and fear. I don't see that. I see reunion, I see a lot of love. So yeah, absolutely less fearful of the process of dying, 100%.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in the past year of working on these topics, the people who have died and come back or explored death in varied states of consciousness, like psychedelics, none of them, none of them have fear of death anymore.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  No, that, that's why we're doing this study. Because most people would assume, you know, it's innate, it's how we survive is to fight off and fear the dying process. And I think there's the death we imagine in health and then there's the dying that we experience within the actual process and they're two very different things.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  And you know, so we're looking at this, this idea of fear, but also of hope. Because what we're always so impressed with is hope for cure obviously vanishes. But hope is vibrant, but it's hope for others. So people don't stop being hopeful. It just transitions in odd ways.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, that's beautiful. Okay, so this one says, my husband drowned and was brought back to life, but never regained consciousness before he passed. I felt that his soul separated from his body in the ocean before he was resuscitated. Do you believe from your experience that he was likely able to hear me talking to him while he was on life support?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have really strong views of this, actually. And I get this question a lot. Can the dying hear? And my firm belief is they can. And I can tell you why for a few reasons. What we see a lot of is dying patients who are not able to express anymore, but are clearly soothed with the presence of family and familiar voices. We see a lot of the opposite.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  What we call the Jerry Springer family, where there's tension, conflict.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  And they'll be there and the patient clearly picks up respiration rates and you can feel the tension from the patient. It gets to the point sometimes where it's very hard to die if you can't get to sleep because deep sleep, because that's the state it happens in, that are really plugged in nurses will actually suggest kindly that the family leave the room so the patient can kind of let go. So I think most of us who spend a lot of time at the bedside of dying patients get all of these clues that the patient's hearing.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  I think what's interesting is what you can't answer is this, is the depth of hearing, of auditory processing. But my analogy is always it's like an infant who doesn't have full language yet, but knows the tones, fluctuations in voice, whatever, the familiarity of mum and dad's voice. That's very, very clear. So whether they are processing the content of speech, what they do, I think more importantly is they feel that comforting familiarity.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, I feel like this comes up so often when we talk to people who have experienced NDEs and when they come back, they recount hearing so much.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Hearing much.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the room, outside of the room, beyond the room.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, we see a lot of this, absolutely.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  All right, well, so this next one says, "Thank you for your incredible work. I was curious if you have ever explored the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In that tradition, the dying consciousness is said to navigate a series of internal landscapes and encounters that offer opportunities for resolution and peace. Do you see parallels between the structured stages described in the ancient texts and the consistent, meaningful visions reported by the patients, particularly regarding the reunion with loved ones?"

• 9:17Speaker 02

  This is such a fantastic question. Yeah, the parallels are actually creepy.

• 9:23Ky Dickens?

  To hear the rest of the AMA and to get Ask Me Anything episodes through the rest of the season from me and other special guests from season two, subscribe to our Backstage Pass. You can find it on our website, thetlepethetapes.com.