On Twitter, a hospice nurse provides observations about our final moments.

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On Twitter, I encountered a fascinating series of observations on death from an unnamed hospice nurse. The Twitter account is from @Rachel, Spirited Sparrow. This particular Twitter link has garnered more than 5.4 million views.

Death fascinates us. The final moments fascinate us. Near-death experiences fascinate us. What the afterlife is like fascinates us. On this blog, we have reviewed at least three books that deal with these topics. One is Map Of Heaven. Another is Glimpses BeyondDeath’s Door. A more recent review is The Devil Sat on My Bed: Encounters with the Spirit World in Mormon Utah.

Now back to the Twitter post. The thread is here. I am going to share only a little of it below this paragraph. I urge readers to go to the above link. The response from readers is also very interesting to read.

Some takeaways after my conversation with a hospice nurse of 12 years based on her experience:

… The people who have the smoothest transition to death tend to be those with a deep faith. The people who have the most difficulty are those who are adamantly anti-faith (rather than just having no faith)

… Men overwhelming more than women will pass when everyone has left the room. ...

… Based on what the dying have said during the end, it seemed to her that they were seeing through sheer curtains, whereas we are always looking at the other side through blackout curtains.

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Recently, LDS Apostle Jeffrey Holland, who has been in poor health, more or less revealed to church members in the church’s April conference that he had a near-death experience. I hear frequend anecdotes about family members near death, conversing with deceased family members that only they can see. I think that correlates with the hospice nurse’s comment about “seeing through sheer curtains.”

The debate over life after death, or whether we will greet deceased family and friends when we die, will always have fervent supporters and opponents. The proof, for better or worse, arrives when we die.

Doctrine on children who die fulfills a primal desire for Latter-day Saint parents

The second-hardest thing I have ever done is hold my infant son in my arms and watch Ray die. The hardest task for my wife and me were allowing Ray to die without a fight. He was born in 2000 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which meant that his heart wouldn’t function on its own. After reviewing the doctors’ options, which involved a high expectation of pain for Ray and a survival chance that a dispassionate observer would rate as virtually nil, we allowed our son to die.


A key advantage of grief is that it allows sorrow to be put into perspective. The months before Ray’s birth, when he was diagnosed, and several months to years after his short life, were very difficult. Moments intended for matrimonial passion become a time for tears when you look into your spouse’s eyes and know what both of you are thinking of. You look at children born at the same time as Ray and resist an impulse of bitter envy. You mentally plug your ears to condolences that your child “was too pure for the world” or vain exclamations from the pulpit of how prayer saved so and so’s child.

But grief is a positive. With time, it allows comprehension to sink in that what happened to your child happens to many, many others every year. You realize that 24 hours with a healthy baby makes you very lucky compared to the countless others left to die too early in terrifying circumstances, with no one to comfort them. If you don’t understand that life’s not fair, that our Creator doesn’t play favorites, then grief can turn you into a selfish, self-pitying person — and that’s a bigger shame than the loss of an innocent.

My wife and I do cling to a faith-based belief that others may call fantasy. We’re LDS, and we regard Joseph Smith as a prophet. When Smith was alive, he taught this, according to a 1918 edition of The Improvement Era: 

President Joseph F. Smith, the sixth President of the Church, reported: ‘Joseph Smith taught the doctrine that the infant child that was laid away in death would come up in the resurrection as a child; and, pointing to the mother of a lifeless child, he said to her: ‘You will have the joy, the pleasure and satisfaction of nurturing this child, after its resurrection, until it reaches the full stature of its spirit.’ …

"In 1854, I met with my aunt [Agnes Smith], the wife of my uncle, Don Carlos Smith, who was the mother of that little girl [Sophronia] that Joseph Smith, the Prophet, was speaking about, when he told the mother that she should have the joy, the pleasure, and the satisfaction of rearing that child, after the resurrection, until it reached the full stature of its spirit; and that it would be a far greater joy than she could possibly have in mortality, because she would be free from the sorrow and fear and disabilities of mortal life, and she would know more than she could know in this life. I met that widow, the mother of that child, and she told me this circumstance and bore testimony to me that this was what the Prophet Joseph Smith said when he was speaking at the funeral of her little daughter."

I choose to believe that I, with many other happy parents, will raise children who died too soon. I’m not convinced of that because a group of retired businessmen say it. I base it on my faith in a loving God and a primal desire to have that privilege. 

But if I’m wrong, I refuse to be disappointed. The 24 hours my wife and I had with Ray was another blessing we will always thank God for.


-- Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardNET in 2010

LDS doctrine on children who die fulfills a primal desire

The second-hardest thing I have ever done is hold my infant son in my arms and watch Ray die. The hardest task for my wife and me were allowing Ray to die without a fight. He was born in 2000 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, which meant that his heart wouldn’t function on its own. After reviewing the doctors’ options, which involved a high expectation of pain for Ray and a survival chance that a dispassionate observer would rate as virtually nil, we allowed our son to die.


A key advantage of grief is that it allows sorrow to be put into perspective. The months before Ray’s birth, when he was diagnosed, and several months to years after his short life, were very difficult. Moments intended for matrimonial passion become a time for tears when you look into your spouse’s eyes and know what both of you are thinking of. You look at children born at the same time as Ray and resist an impulse of bitter envy. You mentally plug your ears to condolences that your child “was too pure for the world” or vain exclamations from the pulpit of how prayer saved so and so’s child.

But grief is a positive. With time, it allows comprehension to sink in that what happened to your child happens to many, many others every year. You realize that 24 hours with a healthy baby makes you very lucky compared to the countless others left to die too early in terrifying circumstances, with no one to comfort them. If you don’t understand that life’s not fair, that our Creator doesn’t play favorites, then grief can turn you into a selfish, self-pitying person — and that’s a bigger shame than the loss of an innocent.

My wife and I do cling to a faith-based belief that others may call fantasy. We’re LDS, and we regard Joseph Smith as a prophet. When Smith was alive, he taught this, according to a 1918 edition of The Improvement Era: 

President Joseph F. Smith, the sixth President of the Church, reported: ‘Joseph Smith taught the doctrine that the infant child that was laid away in death would come up in the resurrection as a child; and, pointing to the mother of a lifeless child, he said to her: ‘You will have the joy, the pleasure and satisfaction of nurturing this child, after its resurrection, until it reaches the full stature of its spirit.’ …

"In 1854, I met with my aunt [Agnes Smith], the wife of my uncle, Don Carlos Smith, who was the mother of that little girl [Sophronia] that Joseph Smith, the Prophet, was speaking about, when he told the mother that she should have the joy, the pleasure, and the satisfaction of rearing that child, after the resurrection, until it reached the full stature of its spirit; and that it would be a far greater joy than she could possibly have in mortality, because she would be free from the sorrow and fear and disabilities of mortal life, and she would know more than she could know in this life. I met that widow, the mother of that child, and she told me this circumstance and bore testimony to me that this was what the Prophet Joseph Smith said when he was speaking at the funeral of her little daughter."

I choose to believe that I, with many other happy parents, will raise children who died too soon. I’m not convinced of that because a group of retired businessmen say it. I base it on my faith in a loving God and a primal desire to have that privilege. 

But if I’m wrong, I refuse to be disappointed. The 24 hours my wife and I had with Ray was another blessing we will always thank God for.


-- Doug Gibson

Originally published at StandardNET in 2010

Apocryphal Hale vision underscores LDS passion for baptism for the dead

With my faith’s practice of baptism for the dead, in my opinion, so misunderstood, it was interesting that this five-page Heber Q. Hale “vision” fell on my desk. It alleges to be a divine vision of the spirit world that Hale, president of the Boise, Idaho, stake almost 100 years ago, received between midnight to 7:30 a.m. on Jan. 20, 1920. Also, Hale is alleged to have delivered the account of his vision in October 1920 at an LDS “Genealogical Conference” in Salt Lake City.

Journalism has hardened my skepticism, and I was prepared to chuckle over Hale’s account. Instead, the account moved me. Maybe it’s because I have an infant son who died, and Hale offers words that would comfort LDS parents who have experienced the death of a young child. Also, the Hale “vision” provides a traditional representation of how Latter-day Saints perceive the afterlife. The Mormon belief in restored Gospel, priesthood authority, necessity of baptism, confirmation, temple ordinances, and other keys and requirements to eternal progression, are underscored in Hale’ comforting “vision.”

It’s such a fun bit of Mormon lore, the Hale “vision,” that it’s almost a shame to throw cold water on it. BYU-Idaho-approved or not, it’s at best apocryphal second- or third-hand stuff, at worst a deliberate hoax. Contributor J. Stapley at the Mormon blog bycommonconsent does a capable job of investigating the Hale “vision." Read the comments too. There’s no record of this account in Hale family books, no record of a “genealogy conference” in Salt Lake City, and other “supporting” material provides names and titles that don’t check out. As one comment on the blog noted, it’s amazing how often Mormons will ignore the canonized examples of modern-day visions, such as Joseph F. Smith’s vision of the Celestial Kingdom, and obsess over the “White Horse Prophecy,” or our current subject.

Having established that the Hale Vision should not be LDS-approved curriculum, I don’t believe it’s a malicious hoax. It sounds like a dream that a deeply religious individual, very versed in Mormon history and theology, may have had. Whether the dream was Hale’s, who died in 1969, or was simply attached to his name, who knows? Hale was born in 1880, early enough to be influenced by how strongly dreams were attached to religious experiences from the 19th century into the 20th century. The LDS Prophet Wilford Woodruff, as Stapley notes, constantly cataloged his dreams. A denunciation of spiritualism and seances from Hale, who asserts those are wicked spirits toying with the foolish, sounds like it would have come from that era. Frankly, I would not be surprised if there were many Latter-day Saints who experienced dreams similar to the Hale Vision.

But I digress. Whoever penned the vision, there are segments that underscore why Mormons believe so fervently in baptism for the dead. I’ll start with one segment that tore at my heart, when infant children are observed. It reads, “I was surprised to find there no babies in arms. I met the infant son of Orson W. Rawlings, my first counselor. I immediately recognized him as the baby who died a few years ago, and yet he seemed to have the intelligence and, in certain respect, the appearance of an adult, and was engaged in matters pertaining to his family and its genealogy. My mind was quite contented upon the point that mothers will again receive into their arms their children who died in infancy and will be fully satisfied, but the fact remains that entrance into the world of spirits is not an inhibition of growth but the greatest opportunity of development. Babies are adult spirits in infant bodies.”

The concept of life, death, and the spirit world as distinct levels of eternal life is captured here: “I passed but a short distance from my body through a film into the world of spirits. This was my first experience after going to sleep. I seemed to realize that I had passed through the change called death and I so referred to it in my conversation with the immortal beings with whom I immediately came into contact. I readily observed their displeasure at our use of the word death and the fear which we attach to it. They use there another word in referring to the transition from mortality to immortality, which word I don’t recall and I can only approach its meaning and the impression which was left upon my mind, by calling it ’the New Birth.’”

The veil, a term used often by Latter-day Saints to indicate how close, yet separate life’s existence is from the spirit world, is exemplified in this paragraph, “My first visual impression was the nearness of the world of spirits to the world of mortality. The vastness of this heavenly sphere was bewildering to the eyes of the spirit-novice. Many enjoyed unrestricted vision, and unimpeded action, while many others were visibly restricted as to both vision and action. The vegetation and landscape were beautiful beyond description; not all green as here, but gold with varying shades of pink, orange, and lavender as the rainbow. A sweet calmness pervaded everything. The people I met there I did not think of as spirits, but as men and women, self-thinking and self-acting individuals, going about important business in a most orderly manner. There was perfect order there and everybody had something to do and seemed to be about their business.”

The concept of family, which lasts forever, far beyond earth, is in this short graph: “As I passed forward, I soon met my beloved mother. She greeted me most affectionately and expressed surprise at seeing me there, and reminded me that I had not completed my allotted mission on earth. She seemed to be going somewhere and was in a hurry and, accordingly, took her leave with saying that she would see me soon again.”

The busyness or Mormon afterlife, the hustle and bustle of making sure that all the required ordinances of the Gospel are met, are found in this segment, which frankly explains baptism for the dead as well as any LDS general authority talking in a conference could: “All men and women were appointed to special and regular service under a well organized plan of action, directed principally toward preaching the gospel to the unconverted, teaching those who seek knowledge and establishing family relationships and gathering genealogies for the use and benefit of mortal survivors of their respective families, that the work of baptism and the sealing ordinances may be vicariously performed for the departed in the temples of God upon the earth. The authorized representatives of families in the world of spirits have access to our temple records and are kept fully advised of the work done therein, but the vicarious work done here does not become automatically effective.

The recipients must first believe, repent and accept baptism and confirmation; then certain consummating ordinances are performed effectualizing these saving principles in the lives of those regenerated beings. And so the great work is going on — they are doing a work there which we cannot do here, and we a work here which they cannot do there, for the salvation of all God’s children who will be saved.”

As doctrine or canon, the Hale vision is, appropriately, officially as inconsequential as the latest “Three Nephites” tale or “Satan as Bigfoot harassing Utah pioneers” account. It could even be a wonderfully moving piece of fiction designed to deceive. But it does a decent job of explaining why we Mormons are running around baptizing all the relatives of so many non-Mormons. I don’t think it would hurt if those outraged over the baptisms read Hale’s “vision.”

-- Doug Gibson

This column was originally published at StandardBlogs.