Do Final Words Reveal What Happens After Death?with Lisa Smartt

Lisa Smartt

In terms of proving that consciousness continues, by all reason, when someone’s brain is the most compromised, you wouldn’t expect that kind of coherency of ideas or story to exist. For me, that seemed like one indication that consciousness continues. When someone dies, that it’s one of the most universal things that people describe is feeling the room filled with people or having loved ones come to our bedside is one of the qualities that everyone talks about when they have a near death experience. They say, “Well, tell us all about it.” They’ll say it was ineffable. There are no words for it.

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when we remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Lisa Smartt, welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast. I want our audience to know that today we’re exploring one of the greatest mysteries of human existence. What happens to consciousness as we approach death? And perhaps an even more important question, what can the dying teach the living? Our guest, as I mentioned, is Lisa Smartt, a linguist, educator, poet, and the author of Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We’re Nearing Death. And after witnessing remarkable changes in her father’s language during his final weeks of life, Lisa began documenting his words, eventually leading to the creation of the final words project. We’ll put that link in the show notes. And that was in collaboration with Dr. Raymond Moody. He’s the pioneering psychiatrist who coined the term near death experience, by the way, everybody. So NDE, thank you Dr. Raymond Moody. And over the past decade, Lisa has analyzed more than 1500 end of life phrases collected from families, caregivers, physicians, and hospice professionals.

Her work has uncovered remarkable patterns in the language of the dying, raising profound questions about consciousness, symbolism, terminal acidity, and whether awareness may extend beyond the brain. Today, my intention is that we’ll explore what Lisa’s learned, how this research changed her own beliefs, and what these final conversations may teach us about how to live with greater presence, meaning and curiosity. Welcome, Lisa, to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Lisa Smartt 

Thank you. Lovely introduction. Thank you.

Lorne Brown 

So Lisa, I want to start with who’s Lisa Smartt? Why did you become so interested in this work?

Lisa Smartt 

Well, from the time I was just a wee one, I loved language. I’ve always just been a language person. When I was seven years old, I would look through the dictionary and when I learned where I could discover the origin of a word, I was like, “Ooh, Daisy, Daisy, just amazing.” And so I just really loved language and it was something my father and I shared and we were both poets. And so I ended up going to school at UC Berkeley. They had a great linguistics department. I studied with Dr. George Lakoff, who some may know was well known for his research into metaphor. So I had a great interest, particularly how language tracks how we think. So I studied with Robin Lakoff as well, who did research into women’s language and men’s language. At the time, we’ve seen big changes in that too, but there were some theories how women speak differently than men.That’s changed over time.

We can talk about that later, but that’s changed.

Lorne Brown 

For the better or not, maybe.

Lisa Smartt 

Yeah, probably mostly for the better. Mostly for the better. So as I said, I had a love for language and how the mind worked, and my specialty was cognitive linguistics. And the way that realized itself in real life is I started working as a learning specialist with people who had trouble learning to read and write, especially adults. I was really interested in what was stopping people who had dyslexia, what they were struggling with. So my real life job was as a learning specialist and a literacy specialist and cracking the code with people, what was going on with them when they couldn’t read or write well. And there are many people who are super bright, who are struggling with language, and I was really intrigued by what was happening with them. I guess now we call people neurodivergent, which I actually love that term. So I was very intrigued, especially by people who were super bright, couldn’t quite crack the code of language.

And I got to see people, for example, like engineers sometimes who were wonderful, especially they would flip letters on the page, the very gift they had for maybe turning a bridge around in their mind, worked against them when they were looking at a word on the page. So I was just really intrigued by that. I worked a lot in prisons with people with language again and what was stopping people from acquiring greater mastery of reading and writing. So it was just a good old career there, nothing too woo-woo or anything. And I was pretty happy that I ended up being the county director of literacy in Napa. I had a good solid life. I also have always been pretty creative, so I had some experience as a writer of having characters come to me just out of the blue with this really strong presence. I had one character who was a flamenco singer and it’s this really magical kind of, not quite possession that’s overstating it, but he really came through me and told me his story.

So just language and consciousness and how it comes through us really intrigued me. And I guess I’ve always been pretty spiritual, but there was always that part of me that was also very analytical, especially as a linguist. I mean, I was someone who was skeptical, so I was open, but kind of like, I don’t know. I’m not convinced yet. So then a series of things happened in the last 12 years that really shifted my consciousness, and partly that was doing this research into final words and having the great, great blessing of working with Dr. Raymond Moody, who coined the term near death experience and shared death experience. And what people don’t know about Raymond is his first interest was nonsense as language. He has two PhDs and his first one was in the philosophy of language. So anyway, I’m going on a lot.

Lorne Brown 

Well, that shows how you guys linked up because you have that common passion for language. Is he a medical doctor as well? He’s an MD psychiatrist, is he?

Lisa Smartt 

He’s an MD psychiatrist. And what happened is –

Lorne Brown 

How did your worlds collide?

Lisa Smartt

Happily. No, really, it was magical. My father, as you mentioned in the introduction, my father who was a complete skeptic.

Lorne Brown

And what’s his background? I always like to know the skeptic and what’s their brain been trained to believe and think like.

Lisa Smartt 

That’s a nice way to put it. He was a PhD psychologist. And

Lorne Brown 

He was skeptical as well, so he was a materialist.

Lisa Smartt 

Exactly. He was a materialist.

Lorne Brown

If I can measure it, I’ll believe in it. If I can’t measure it, maybe not.

Lisa Smartt

Absolutely. That was exactly my father. And I’m grateful for that perspective because they gave me some tools too, but definitely he was that way. 

Lorne Brown

I believe in the balance too, by the way, because you can have your head in the clouds, that’s not going to work here, or you can have your feet on the ground. I don’t think that makes life so much fun. The way I see you is you have your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground. It’s kind of balance, yin young balance. Sorry I interrupted you, but I wanted to make sure our audience, we’re not criticizing if you have that analytical, it’s a beautiful brain. I just think people tend to have more flow and joy in the world when they can have both versus one or the other.

Lisa Smartt 

I really, really, and I agree. And that’s part of what this whole work has been for me with the final words. I agree with you completely. So what happened is my father was over-radiated. He had prostate cancer, which was pretty routine, but they over-radiated him and he ended up getting this horrible infection and he died within a three-week period. I mean, it shouldn’t have happened, but it did. And in that three-week period, the very first night when we were home from the hospital, he got up and he started to walk out the front door in his underwear on the whole January night. And he actually did walk down the stairs and left the house. I wasn’t living at time. I shouldn’t have said we, but my mother said that he left and he encountered the police and he told the police he was going to go to the big art exhibit because my mother was an artist and he was going to bring boxes to the art exhibit for my mother.

And the police said, “Okay, guy, in the car, you’re crazy.” And they brought him back to the hospital essentially. But that was the beginning of him kind of unraveling what we think of unraveling into that space where language begins to shift as people die. And it’s not uncommon that one of the things people do as they approach death is they announce some kind of big event coming, the big dance, the big metaphor, the big art show, the big thing that’s coming. We had a lot of golfers. A lot of people would announce that big golf game coming up or the poker game, but people announce some kind of big event that’s really close to their heart. At the time, I didn’t know that it was just my papa who was talking and he announced the big art exhibition. And then over a period of about three weeks, because I was a linguist, he started saying all kinds of things that I just started writing down and being kind of blown away by, especially as he got really close to dying and he started talking about angels in the room, which was crazy because he usually would roll his eyes at the word angel.

And then right before he died, he said, “The angels say three days left and that’s all, just three days enough. And I’ll be darned three days later.” My father, for him to like that, I almost called him my husband.

Anyway, and my father passed away three days. But anyway, there’s just this wealth of language that I can’t summarize right now, but just a wealth of it that I wrote down. And as someone who loved language and studied it, I was intrigued and I just lived, my parents lived right down the way from UC Berkeley where I went to school when I was younger. So soon after he passed on, I went to UC Berkeley, asked him if there was anything available about final words and what people say, and they looked at me kind of horrified like, “You want to study the language of the dying? Ooh, why would anyone want to do that?” And I said, “Because we study the language that how people acquire language, why wouldn’t we want to study how they let it go?” And they just kind of shook their head like, “No, no, no.

There’s nothing like that in the archives here.” So I started reading everything I could about end of life, and I came across Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, which I read when I was 17. At that time, I was 52. I read through the book and I was like, “Oh God, I’d love to meet this guy.” Coincidentally, I was at Temple with my mother and one of our friends came up to us and said, “How you doing?” I said, “Well, I’m really curious about final words.” And he said, “Well, I just happened to be doing a workshop with Raymond Moody. I’ll be teaching with him. Maybe you should come on over and check it out.” So I flew out to Alabama to this workshop that Raymond was doing. It was a small group of folks, just 15 of us. And on the fourth day of the workshop, Raymond said, “I’ve been looking for a linguist who’d be interested in studying final words.” And I said, “Holy moly.” And I raised my hand and then the rest is, boy, over 10 years of working together.

And so that’s kind of how we met. It was just really, really magical.

Lorne Brown 

I love how synchronicities happen because when we were off camera, we were talking about you’re living in Ireland now, how you just let things flow a bit and things just really work out well often when you get out of the way and follow the tide, which led you to Raymond and now in Ireland. I have some questions around the patterns you see at the end of life, if you could share what you have discovered in the work that you’ve done and over these now over a decade. Things I heard is it sounds like there’s a journey. They know they’re going somewhere else. So I though you could unpack that a bit more. And it does sound like their life here, the language here, there can be a little bit of a parallel, like you talked about the great golf game or going to an art gallery.

Can you just talk a little bit more about that, the patterns that you see as well from the documentation that you’ve done?

Lisa Smartt 

Yeah, I piece advice too. One is metaphors. So you see a wealth of metaphor and two kinds appear. One is the announcement of some kind of big event, and the other is I’m going on a trip. And so you’ll hear someone say something like, “I need my passport. I need my passport.” And the family members would be like, “Oh God, what is dad talking about? What is this passport stuff?” But someone who might be, for example, one of the chaplains I interviewed who heard this language before would say to this person, other people she worked with, “Your passport, of course. We’re going to get you your passport so you can go. Where do you think you’re going to go?” “Oh, I’m going to that other country. I’m going to that other place, “or whatever. And then the chaplain often would enter into that world with the person rather than discount it, just like,” Yeah, we’re going to get your passport.

“Or one person was like,” My Jetta, my Jetta needs some gas. I need to get gassed up. “And again, another very savvy hospice nurse said,” Yes, sir, we’re going to get you some gas and get you to where you’re going. “And so people just talk about some kind of journey often. It’s rare. I think only once I heard someone say they were going to walk. Usually it was some kind of mode of transportation, like a bus, a plane. Trains are really common. So that’s one very common pattern that I was not the first one to discern that. Other people have seen that in other books. And let’s see, other one pattern that I found really exciting and intriguing is something I call a sustained narrative that when you write down what they say over a period of time, you actually see, they might say one night, okay, the train’s here.

Everyone’s going, oh, grandpa’s just like, what’s he talking about? But then the next night, grandpa says, the train’s pulling into the station and then the next night, and I better get my bags. And then maybe three nights later, okay, conductor says it’s time. So what happens is you’ll see this story kind of evolves over time. So the amazing beauty of tracking what your loved ones say at end of life is what seems like random disconnected language often, not always, but often you can track that there’s actually a narrative that’s sustained over time. And oftentimes it has to do with a trip or people going somewhere or something else, but some kind of metaphor.

Lorne Brown 

And how do you think of that? Because I’m thinking of these people that are near death, they’re not super lucid maybe all the time, but yet if we pay attention to this and you tie it together, they have not a disconnected or disjointed story, they actually have a coherent story. So can you talk about that a bit because it doesn’t make sense that they would be able to carry on a story if they’re kind of incapacitated.

Lisa Smartt 

Exactly. That was exactly what I thought. I mean, that was what blew me away why I mentioned it, because in terms of proving that consciousness continues, by all reason, when someone’s brain is the most compromised, is the most compromised, you wouldn’t expect that kind of coherency of ideas or story to exist. And so for me, that seemed like one indication that consciousness continues. How do we do that? How do we do that? Or something else said like terminal lucidity right now. There was just an article I think yesterday in the New York Times about it where people could be in a coma, could lose what seems like all their lucidity because as we get closer to death, there’s clearly we’re not as lucid, but then people often will have this flash of lucidity before they die and clarity. And sometimes it’s so dramatic. There was one case and I researched it, it was completely credible when I did the research of it.

This gentleman had a mother who first had Alzheimer’s, then she was in a coma. And so she was completely compromised by scientifically. And then she came out just about three days before she died and she said, “John, I want to let you know that all the financial files are in the second drawer down in my study so that everything is just there all organized for you.” And then she went back into her coma. How do you explain that? I mean, those are the kinds of things.

Lorne Brown 

I’m moderating on my other company at Healthy Seminars a Dallas Death Medicine mentorship. So I get to witness this incredible information taught by a doctor of Chinese medicine, Randine Lewis. And we’ll edit this out if this puts you on the spot, but I actually am going to get you two connected. I think I’d love to have you show up as a guest in the mentorship to talk about this because Chinese medicine actually, so a thousand years ago, they have this understanding of this terminal lucidity and what’s happening and why in Chinese medicine. There’s a whole concept around it. And so when they see it, that’s just like, oh, it’s really near. It’s a normal phenomena that’s expected when the shin, the spirit, it’s a big revival before it leaves the body. I won’t go into it because all on the mentorship and how we sometimes sedate and drug the dying because they look uncomfortable, but it’s only looking uncomfortable to us, maybe not to them.

It’s just the birthing of the soul out of the physical body and we can sometimes interfere with it. And it’s interesting how you talk about, and we’re going to go more into it, but when they go in the story, rather than saying, oh, you’re talking nonsense, stop it, you’re like, okay, well get your passport. And so they talk about how to support the journey so it feels safe and comfortable by coming alongside them rather than trying to make them fit into your material world of that’s nonsense. Going back to asking you this question then, because you talked about the person had that lucidity in a coma, not around, and this is not isolated. You’ve seen this, this is documented multiple times where they come out and they’re coherent. Can you help us with the nonsense language then? And how do you know difference between nonsense in a negative way, like delusional versus they’re tapping into something else?

And have you come across any work within Alzheimer’s and near death? Because they also can have this, what we’re calling nonsense, and I’m putting in quotes. And my personal story, I’ve worked with an Alzheimer’s patient once in his 80s, not very mobile. They’d have to start to barricade him in the room a bit because he would go on these night walks and he thought he was like 16 years old having to, the police got him, but this guy that could hardly walk would climb over a fence in his underwear, climb over, he’d get hurt, but he didn’t multiple times. And when they arrested him in his underwear in the cold night like you were describing, they’d ask him what he’s doing. He goes, “I got to get my papers delivered,” because he was a paper boy when he was a teenager. “I got to get my papers delivered on time.

“So I’m just wondering, the reason I bring this up is, is there a difference between somebody with Alzheimer’s and near death? Because I’m wondering if the brain is shifting and they’re just tapping into something else and it may look like nonsense to us, but there’s something else that we’re not maybe noticing because we’re not paying attention to it.

Lisa Smartt 

Yeah, absolutely. Well, good question. And I did some research in the Alzheimer’s. The language that I’ve noticed, it is a little different often, but not always. With the Alzheimer’s, there’s more kind of regressive, like going back to the childhood or that there’s something going back, whereas in end of life language, it’s like they’re definitely going somewhere they haven’t been before. It’s a slightly different 

Lorne Brown 

Interesting distinguishing. So one’s more about the past and the other one’s more about the future. Yeah.

Lisa Smartt 

And of course when someone has Alzheimer’s and they’re approaching the threshold, then the language becomes more the language of going somewhere that’s. But at end of life, people do refer to home. They do refer to home. But with Alzheimer’s, there’s usually more references to childhood and so forth, but I haven’t really studied it deeply. I’m talking about very informal impressions speaking with people. But in both cases, I think it’s like for those of us who’ve had children, when children come in and say, “Mommy, there’s a rabbit hanging out with me in my bedroom,” we don’t go, “Oh my God, Jesus Christ, will you cut it?” I hope we don’t. We shouldn’t do it. Most parents don’t. We don’t. Or if they say, “Mommy may want a cookie,” or something, oftentimes what most parents will do is they’ll meet the child where they are and just build upon it and explore it like, “Oh, there’s a bunny in your.

That’s so awesome.” So I sort of encourage the same kind of thing when people are dying, not in a way that’s patronizing at all, but to meet them where they are. And a really amazing example of this is with Dr. Raymond Moody, because when he was doing his residency in cardiology, he was, excuse me, placed in a cardiology unit, intensive care, people would come and have these experiences and they would die and come back. They resuscitated them and they would say this stuff that at the time, way back, many years ago, decades ago, people said, “Oh my God, these patients are coming back. They’re just completely on all that medication and they’re just delirious. You can’t believe a word they were saying.” So people coming back like, “Well, I left my body. I looked down at myself and then I saw this tunnel and I walked in.” The traditional thing people were saying, “Raymond, don’t listen to them.

They’re just completely delusional.” Well, Raymond, because his first PhD was in the studying of nonsense, and he back then, this is how brilliant the guy is, categorized 72 types of nonsense. And because he did that and he knew that language was dynamic and that we should be descriptive and not prescriptive, that is we just describe how language is not say how it should be. So he just started doing what I did. He just started writing down what these people resuscitated started to said, and guess what happened when he followed the nonsense? There were patterns with the near death, and it didn’t matter what kind of meds they had, it even didn’t matter what kind of illnesses they had, those patterns emerged because of course, what we believe, Raymond and I, is that they are reflections of consciousness, patterns of consciousness. So you just asked me about the nonsense, that’s just one piece.

Raymond said that there’s something he calls a nonsense taboo. We have this fear of and judgment of nonsense, and if we just dismiss it right away, we’re preventing ourselves from a whole rich, just a whole rich cornucopia, I guess you could say, of possibility in terms of what we can learn about who we are as conscious beings. Because if you think about how we love Dr. Seuss or how much we love Lewis and Carol, we love, not always, but there is this human intrigue with nonsense. Nonsense is part of who we are as speakers. And one of my biggest blessings of working with Raymond Moody was he taught me that nonsense is also human. We make sense and we don’t make sense and both are part of the human experience. So that was a great teaching for me with Raymond. 

Lorne Brown 

Is it because of just, I can’t remember the word you used, descriptive prescriptive I think it was, but is it just because we have this bias for way language should be? Your story reminded me of, I just recall a dream I had without going to the dream. It was so profound. I had the answer, I discovered the universe, how it works, and I remember writing it down in my journal, and then when I woke up, I couldn’t remember the dream, but I remember it was profound and I open up and I read it and I’m like, “What the hell?” I couldn’t make sense of it, but it was profound. And then I think about in preparing for our interview, just the things that you documented, it’s kind of like I don’t get the language, but it seems like the person who’s experiencing it, it has incredible meaning.

And so can you unpack that for us a bit, as in why we shouldn’t dismiss what we think is nonsense? I think of one of your stories where the baby and the grandmother are doing gibberish to each other. Can you share that a bit? Because it seemed like they were having a pretty intense conversation.

Lisa Smartt 

Oh yeah. Thank you for remembering that. Yeah. First, I’ll describe that story and there’s one thing I just want to respond to. First is one of the qualities that everyone talks about when they have a near death experience. They say, “Well, tell us all about it.” They’ll say it was ineffable. There are no words for it. No words for it. So just like your experience, something happened and no matter how you combine words, you just couldn’t quite get your dream completely. So there is this kind of ineffable language and sometimes really great poets, sometimes nonsense or jazz can kind of get to states of consciousness where it’s different and the language reflects that. But this one story was great, and I heard a few stories similar to this where there was a dying. There were couple that were really strong. And let’s say this one that you talked about, there’s a dying grandmother and there’s a toddler who was two, and the family was visiting, and they were just looking to each other and getting it.

And we don’t really know what that is. We don’t know. I mean, just like consciousness, some people talk about frequencies

That we’re sort of energetic or even my husband – Sounds

Lorne Brown 

Like telepathic almost that the baby and the grandmother were having. Well,

Lisa Smartt 

That’s another possibility too. I mean, Eben Alexander, who’s well known for his book Proof of Heaven 

Lorne Brown 

I’m interviewing him on Monday.

Lisa Smartt 

How perfect timing. It’s awesome. 

Lorne Brown 

Tell me what you’re going to say here. This will be good.

Lisa Smartt 

Wonderful. He’s a wonderful human being and he was very supportive of my work. He talked about his experience with his near death experience as being non-linguistic. So people were communicating, I’m going to use the word vibes. There were these vibes, like these telepathic frequencies of vibrations, and it was called non-linguistic communication. And my husband’s a musician and we know what music does, just certain frequencies can influence us. There’s so much I feel like we still don’t know about what. Some people, this is very. Talk about angel language or when people speak in tongues, people talk about that. And people have very powerful experiences speaking in tongues. What we have found, Newberg, I think was one of the people that people’s consciousness. Actually changed when they did the speaking in tongues with glossolalia, that something happened to their consciousness and it actually shifted. Well, even if you think about mantras or chanting, there is something that happens to us with language that isn’t tied to specific concrete reality.

There’s something that can happen.

Lorne Brown 

Can you not necessarily define, but I want to hear what this has revealed about consciousness for you. So this work that you have and how it’s shifted for you. So all the patterns you’ve seen and the near death experiences that you’ve got to look into or hear about and wells those people in their near death end of days, what’s changed or what do you understand at this point about consciousness and maybe define it somewhat of how you’re defining it beyond the brain, right? Newberg, the discussion we always has, is it the brain that makes it or is it the brain the receiver? And where are you at in that camp of the discussion?

Lisa Smartt 

Receiver. Receiver all the way. I mean, when I started this research, I was one of those people who would get onto an airplane and cling to the seat because I was so terrified. And now I’m at a place. I don’t want to die tomorrow. I’m scared like all of us, but I don’t have the kind of fear that I used to have.

Lorne Brown 

The death anxiety. You don’t have death anxiety to describe?

Lisa Smartt 

Yeah. I mean, at least knock on wood, I don’t because I have such a sense. When you speak to so many people who’ve had near death experiences who are, you’ll talk to Eben, talk about scientific and grounded person. So there are so many people who’ve had these experiences and I’m absolutely convinced now. And also what’s happened in my life, I’ve had a lot of personal challenges. My daughter got COVID and almost died from it at the same time. My mother was terminally ill with cancer. I was caring for my daughter upstairs who was very ill. My mother downstairs. I mean, I had this really challenging three years and I would pray for lack of a better word or meditate. And I really felt like I could connect to the field or to spirit in a way that I didn’t believe. The more you feel that it’s real and the more the science and the logic shows you that it does exist, the easier it is to access it.

In my life, the more I access the field, the more it lives there for me. It’s the more it expands. And one piece of research I want to share, which was the most important research I think, besides speaking to so many near death experiencers, was Kenneth Ring’s beautiful research with people who were blind, who had near death experiences. And there was a sample of 38 people and I think all of them but two were blind from birth. So basically they’d never seen, they’d never had sight. 82% of them when they had near death experiences, they could see. They could look down at themselves from above their bodies. And one described what the doctor was wearing, exactly the tie. One was able to actually see that the doctor and one of the nurses was having an affair.

Lorne Brown 

Remote viewing. And these people had never had sight, you’re saying?

Lisa Smartt 

And these people never had sight. The book is called, he did it with Sharon Cooper. I think it’s called Mindsight. It’s been a while since. I mean, how could that not be? I mean, Kenneth was a reputable researcher, PhD. I mean, there was no woo-woo. This was research that he did. And how could that be possible if consciousness didn’t?

Lorne Brown

Yeah. Again, that goes back to the brain’s a receiver and that conscious is everywhere all happening at once. And it reminds me of, it was in an episode in the telepathy tapes where they’re working with the neurodivergent autistic children where they’re blindfolded and they’re able to read the pages on the book without using their eyes. And then I’ve only had one experience, it’s not a study power one, but I was at the Daoist Death Medicine Retreat. We had a physical retreat in Mexico and we’re doing some cool work with, I have a neurovisor, so it’s just flickering like eyes are closed. But afterwards they said they saw all these ancestors and little statues and all this beautiful stuff that was her experience. But what was interesting when we went into the building, so we’re outside, we walked in directly, and she said it’s right behind me on my left-hand side.

I could see it the whole time. When we went into the building, there was an altar built with little statues and people putting things out for their ancestors as a part of a ceremony. So she was seeing it all with her eyes closed facing the other direction and we only connected the two when we came back. So to share with, there’s more to this world than we can see with our five senses basically is what we’re sharing.

Lisa Smartt 

And nonsense. Nonsense.

Lorne Brown 

Nonsense

Lisa Smartt 

Is not sensory. Sensory. Not sensory. And one thing I wanted to add, that’s a great story and there’s so many of those once you’re in this field for so many years. Just one more. Oh, do I remember what I was going to say? Oh yeah. Visitations at end of life. I mean, so many people talk about having their relatives come to their bedside right before they pass. And even WebMD, which is kind of mainstream medicine, says that that’s one of the indications that someone’s very close to dying is they start talking about relatives who have passed on being at their bedside. Now, there were cases that I looked at where people didn’t know that maybe their sister had passed away in a car accident because they had been in a coma, but they would maybe come out and then see their sister who was on the other side that they didn’t know that she had passed in the spirit, no pun intended of what you were talking about.

So after hearing those kinds of stories and things, it’s really hard for me to go, eh, bunch of nonsense.

Lorne Brown 

And that’s the true scientist. So there is the, I’ll quote the late Bill Bengston when I had an opportunity to interview him a couple of times. He goes, “You got the believers and the non-believers.” He goes, “I don’t like either of them when I have to do work.” He goes, “The non-believers, no matter how much data I give them, they can’t believe. They’ve already made up their mind.” And then the believers, I can make up stuff and they’re going to believe me. They’re no fun either. I want the healthy skeptic where they want to believe, but they need you to give them a little bit of evidence and support. And so what I’m hearing you say is, look, it’s hard to understand and grasp us with how we understand the world. However, you cannot ignore all these experiences that have been reported. There’s something more than what we think we are.

I think way back when, when we thought the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. I mean, it’s so obvious when you look up in the sky that the sun is rotating around the earth. It’s obvious. You got to be insane to say differently, look, and to tell me that the earth is spinning, I don’t feel it spinning. I’m not dizzy. But now we accept it, so now we can understand that it looks like the sun is rotating around the earth, but we actually know it’s the other way around. And so it’s the same thing here with this paradigm shift is it looks like, but there’s all this other stuff to say why maybe death anxiety is not necessary because all the relatives, the light, the love that you get to experience. And I interviewed Julie Ryan, and I can’t validate whether her stuff is real or not, but she wrote a book, I have it on my desk here because I just interviewed her last week, Angelic Attendants.

And she says everybody that she’s worked with near death, there’s tons of people and relatives in the bedsides. And she even has it down to on the matriarch and patriarch, who comes to your feet and at what stage? And based on how many people in the room and who’s arrived, she can tell how close you are to death because they kind of come in a sequence as they arrive and everybody has this. Nobody dies alone, she says.

Lisa Smartt 

I love it. Yes. Great. I’ll have to look at her book. Yes, because one of the things that in the time that I knew Raymond, believe it or not, Raymond, even though he did the near death experience, he was a trained hardcore skeptic, Raymond Moody. And in the time I knew him, he said to me one day after talking to Eben Alexander, there was one other story which I want to share with you in a minute, but Raymond called me, he said, “I think I’m convinced. I think now after 50 years, I finally, that little bit of skeptic that’s always there because I was scientifically trained. I have two PhDs, I mean a PhD and MD, excuse me.” So he said, “I’m finally convinced.” One of the things that convinced him is the shared death experience where when someone dies, oftentimes other people either know it’s going to happen in very, very, you’re talking about the crowded rooms that discussed.

It’s very common that people are dying start talking about these crowded rooms. So when my father was dying, before I even knew what a shared death experience was, it was maybe a week, I can’t remember, about a week before he died, I think. I woke up in the middle of the night and it felt like there were all these people, you know that feeling when there’s presence? And I remember looking at the clock and it was 3:13 I think in the morning and I’m like, “Can I feel these people in the room? I wonder what’s going on?” And my husband’s like, “I got to sleep.” Get back to sleep. I said, “No, maybe my dad’s dying or something. I just feel it.” And they said, “Well, you’ll see a pop tomorrow. Just let’s get back to sleep.” Well, the next day after work, I went to my mom and my dad’s house and I said, “Mom, how’s dad?” And she said, “The worst thing happened about 3:15 in the morning, your dad woke up and started talking about how crowded the room was.” And I said, “Morty, what are you talking about?

There’s no one here.” “No, there’s so many people here. “So that’s a very common thing. David Kessler also wrote about it. So cool that he actually, again, scientifically analyzed who was appearing and stuff. And we know that it’s one of the most universal things that people describe is feeling the room filled with people or having loved ones come to our bedside. And it was the experience with Jeff Olsen, a doctor and a patient had a shared death experience, which is the thing that totally convinced Raymond. After that happened, he’s like, okay, that’s it. No more skepticism. There was someone, this guy, Jeff Olsen, had a horrible car accident. They brought him to the emergency room. I may have some details a little bit off, but it’s very close. And the doctor, Dr. Driscoll, it was among the doctors there, and he saw Jeff Olsen’s wife as she was passing on.

And again, this is a doctor, not some woo-woo. So when Raymond heard more about people’s experiences like mine of the crowded room across miles or being in an operating room and the doctor saying, oh my God, his wife just came to me. So these experiences in scientific environments are just really, as you said before, they’re so compelling and it’s so reassuring to me.

Lorne Brown 

It reminds me of, he’s a doctor as well, Paul Dieppe. I interviewed him on my podcast and he’s a medical doctor and he was kidnapped back in the day, Kuwait, I think it was. And he popped, he had an awakening because with the guns at him, they were going to kill him. They didn’t obviously, but they were going to kill him and he had that near death experience without dying, the lighted understanding, no fear. But then while he was in captivity, while he was hostage, his father visited him and it was just clear as day. And then he wasn’t released, I don’t know the details, but let’s call it weeks or months. And when he was released, he learned that his father had passed and the day his father passed was the same day that he had a visit from him while he was in captivity.

So yes, there’s more to this world than meets the eye. How about for all of us that are in this material world that aren’t passing over yet, what has this taught you about living then? And I’ll ask it this way so it’s not so general. I think of a friend whose father, she was estranged from her father, so he wasn’t what you would call the standup dad in this world. So she hadn’t spoken to him for decades, but he had a terminal illness and she decided to go and visit him. And it seemed like he went through a purification before he died, and there was a lot of forgiveness that happened and their relationship healed. So for years of turmoil in a very short period, it was like that history just evaporated. I’m curious what your thoughts are on, I call it the veil of this purification that we go through anyhow, but it seems like in those hours or weeks before, sometimes there can be a transformation as well as in this unraveling of language, and I think it’s just unraveling of ego.

I’m leading the witness here, but I’m curious because I’ve only read a little bit on it, this is kind of your life work now, what has the dying taught you about living?

Lisa Smartt 

Yeah, I love that. Yes. Again, two things. One is when you look at terminal lucidity, that period where people said that you had mentioned too that Chinese medicine, is that correct that that was –

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, has an understanding of it. Yeah.

Lisa Smartt

But in all the phrases that I studied that came across when there was terminal lucidity right before they died, no one said, “You piece of crap, you are always a horrible son.” No one said that. People always said, “Forgive me.” In one case, there was a father-in-law who was always very critical of his daughter-in-law and said that she was not attractive, just yucky. And then when he had his little terminal lucidity, he turned to her and said, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen how beautiful you are. I’m so sorry.” There were terms of forgiveness. And so in that window of terminal lucidity, the things that people say are always, really, always, I didn’t see any exceptions, were forgiving. Now, sometimes right before people die, they were uncomfortable and they may say all kinds of things, but the terminal lucidity is this kind of golden period where people really look for forgiveness.

I’m going to tell a story for my own personal. My mother, like so many mothers and daughters, we had some tough times. She felt, I think I’m not going to go into the details, but she made some mistakes like all mothers do. And she didn’t believe in any of this, but I did, of course, and talked to her about things. And as she got closer to dying, she did. She said, “I remember that time.” I’m trying to think how honest to get. I’m going to be honest, really honest. My mother was very ambivalent about being a mother, and she let me know it. And there’s this picture when I was four years old on a yacht. We didn’t want it. We rented it for vacation for an hour, but in the picture, I guess I was three and a half, four, my parents were glowing and gorgeous were here, and then I was way to the side and they kept saying they didn’t want me in the photograph.

And I had a role of lifesavers that I was holding onto and eating, and they began my career with loving sweets to take care of all my sorrows. Anyway, so I was holding that and they didn’t want me in the photo, and they were there glamorous, this beautiful couple. And it was a picture I always held onto because that was sort of my experience growing up of being excluded from their very beautiful. My mother was gorgeous and they were just sort of artists, beautiful. And he was a psychologist too, but they had this sort of. And I was very much excluded. They had a very passionate love affair, but I was kind of in the way in many ways. And that photograph I kept in my life because it was just a reminder to me and just it was a photograph that was important to me.

As my mother was dying, I think it was about a month before she died, she said, “I’m thinking of that time in Acapulco on that boat.” That photo I kept private, I found it 30 years ago. There was nothing I ever talked to her about. She said, “I’m thinking of that.” She said, “What a terrible thing I did. No mother should love her husband more than her own child or at least treat her child that way.” She said, “It was a terrible thing. I’m really sorry.” And I was blown away that she remembered that. And that to me was consciousness in a way because it was so long ago and such a thing. And there were other things I’m not going to discuss now that I will in time in other platforms, but some really awful things that happened to me as a child. And at the very, very end, she was very, very sick and I called an ambulance and these firemen actually came out.

They came to get her and she stood up and she loved men. She stood up and even as sick as she was, she was like, “Oh, it’s so good to see you all.” She said, “Wait, before you take me to the hospital,” and there were five of them, and they all surrounded me. I mean her, I’m sorry. She said, “Wait, I want you to be witness to this. I need to apologize to my daughter, and I want you all to witness this moment.” She said, “I am so sorry for any pain I caused you.” I’ll never forget, there was one senior firefighter, he put her hand and mine together, and it felt godsend.

And of course, I did lots of apologies too, because my God, I was far from being a perfect daughter. So we exchanged a lot of apologies to one another, but that was such a powerful moment. So I think one more last story. We save a little bit more time about my mother at the end. She didn’t believe in God at all, most of my childhood, and I had a very strong feeling for much of my life that there was something, and then I got to really research what that was. But before my mom died, she goes, “I saw him.” I said, “Who, Mom?” She said, “God, I saw him.” I said, “Mom, that’s beautiful,” because here I knew all this stuff about near death experiences. “That’s fabulous, mom. “She said,” Yeah, his name, he was wearing a little mustard-colored sweater like your father used to have.

I went, “Mom, that’s fabulous.”

And he called me Susula. I said, “Oh, mom, that’s wonderful.” And she said, “His name is Herb.” I said, “Mom, that’s beautiful.” I mean, by the time she passed on, I feel very, very, very, very, very forgiving. I mean, whatever trespasses were, and of course, like I said, I was far from a perfect daughter, but I feel like we left really having forgiven each other. I thought of actually writing another book about this because of my final words work and because of my research in the NDE, I was so open to any kind of language that emerged and whatever she said, and that was such a blessing because the language was one layer that allowed deeper forgiveness and deeper healing. I feel very much like she’s with me now, and I feel we’re very. When people pass on, my experience has been that they’re no longer the ego, as you had mentioned, right there back to spirit.

So it can be a very powerful process to go through that. And when you have a sense of the language of the threshold and how it works and to keep your heart open, then lots of things are possible in terms of forgiveness, because I think most people, before they pass on, they want to leave this world feeling a sense of closure and completeness. And so I was blessed that I had that with both my parents.

Lorne Brown 

And I think myself and our listeners are blessed that you shared that story, because I think so many people will have a healing and an opportunity to have healing with loved ones because of what you just shared. So thank you for sharing that. And it sounds like, and again, it sounds like I’m going to ask your experience is that as we near the death experience, for many people at least, the ego takes the backseat and conscious, which so many people describe as loving, takes the front seat, which allows for loving and healing and forgiveness because not only is the language unwinding, it appears, but it’s almost like as the ego unwinds and conscious comes to the front, typical language also can change. Is that kind of what I’m observing?

Lisa Smartt 

Yeah. And also, it’s really important for me to say that I don’t want to sugarcoat this. I mean, there are times that people do say challenging things and it’s not always, because I don’t want anyone to ever feel like there’s something wrong with them or their experience if it’s something different. But I think the potential becomes larger when we walk into that territory of dying with curiosity and tools for exploring consciousness and language with a sense of wonder rather than judgment and fear. But be general with yourself and your family if there aren’t those kinds of golden experiences because sometimes they don’t happen.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, and then they can come. Well, the people that have had the near death experiences often say that those relatives that were a piece of work in life are not like that when they see them in the other experience. And I’ve had a near death like experience as in I popped, so I’ve had that experience without medication, just it was a spontaneous pop. So it was only after when I read Moody’s books and a couple others, Eben Alexander’s, when I read about it, I was like, “Oh my God, I had that, but I didn’t die. I didn’t even come close to dying. I just popped.” But what connected me to, this is just my experience on a psychedelic trip, I had that experience where everybody I saw, we knew each other, what was in our hearts automatically. There was no language, which wasn’t good for me and my psychedelic because you couldn’t hide.

So I wasn’t on the other side, so all the bad shit, karma shit showed up. But what I had experienced or learned from the integration, for me, this is just me, I can’t confirm this. I’m saying this because it ties into those that don’t say nice things at the end, is that soul individual, to me, it was like there was a veil. I can describe it loosely. It’s not the right language because I can’t describe it, but there’s a veil and it’s like a purification that all that dredging garbage does get purified. So even if they’re a piece of work and their last breath, when they go through that veil, they’re back to that love and source. And then when you connect with them, none of that old stuff is there, even if it doesn’t happen on the deathbed. That was what I subscribed to only because of my experience that I got to experience.

Lisa Smartt

No, I think so. And the more that, again, we can stay open and less afraid of what we hear, the more sense of wonder and possibility we have. My mother, which is common, had a lot of anxiety. It makes sense. Our bodies, we’re animals, we’re part animals. A lot of people, understandably, and I will be one of them probably, have this incredible anxiety before they die. We’re animals. We don’t want to let go of the body. She was talking about people with cameras following her and all of this kind of really paranoid stuff, which is not uncommon. But I felt like the more I could just sit with her and talk to her and about the light, I saw this light coming in and we could have conversations, it was a way to give her comfort and also for her to engage where if I ran out of the room afraid of the things she was saying.

And if you imagine that what’s happening is sacred, then you can create the context and the possibility for healing, and that’s an invitation I would offer to everyone.

Lorne Brown 

Before we wrap up, if we can have more of your time, I kind of want to go into that last part that you just started on of what can we do for those of our loved ones that are in a near death situation? My personal experience, I got to be by my grandfather’s, both grandfather’s bedsides in their last weeks. One thing, this is just quick tangent, both of them did the reaching in the days before they died. So I’d like you to comment. They were comatose and all of a sudden they’re sitting up in bed and doing this, right? And one of them would write for the week before he died. He was just writing and trying to point to stuff. And again, this was over 20 years ago, I was like, “What is going on? He’s totally trying to tell me stuff. He can’t speak and he’s just writing and pointing.” So both of them had the terminal lucidity, and I feel fortunate because I just sat there and did my best to comfort both of them while I was there.

But now that I have you, and I think of anybody else I’m going to support in that death process, can you provide us with guidance? I’ve heard, don’t dismiss them. When they say the train’s coming, don’t say, “That’s nonsense. The trains, you’re in a hospital.” Also, if they’re not speaking and their eyes are closed, do they hear us? Is it worthwhile to talk or just sit in silence? Can you give some support to those that maybe who are listening have somebody that is in that dying process or one day I think nobody’s immune to it, I think we’re all going to have somebody that’s going to pass. How can we support our loved ones in this process?

Lisa Smartt 

Just connect. Great stories, by the way. Thank you for those. So I think it’s really important to think about connection and how do we connect? There are many ways to connect. One of my favorite accounts from when I was doing my research was this one woman was talking about how her mother, they used to talk a lot. They had this very verbal connection and they really adored that. And as her mother was closer to dying, she didn’t talk very much. And the daughter felt a great sense of loss, understandably, about that. But she just decided one day to just sit in the hospital room. Was it hospital? I’m sorry, like a facility.

Lorne Brown 

Hospice.

Lisa Smartt

Yeah. Yeah. But it was not at home. It was in a hospice center, but not at the house. But anyway, so we’re sitting there and she just started praying and she just started talking to her mother in her mind. And she thought she could hear her mother talk back, but she wasn’t certain, but she kept continuing. And then there was a knock on the door and it was a nurse to come in to bring lunch and the mother kind of stirred and the woman said, “Do you want your lunch? Everything okay in here?” And the woman said, “Oh yes, I’ve been having the most amazing conversation with my daughter.” So I love that story because it does seem like the veil is then in terms of telepathic speech. So that’s always a possibility. If you think they don’t hear you telepathically, just keep that possibility open.

And yes, we know that the last thing to go when someone passes is they’re hearing, and most hospice workers will really say kind and gentle things at the end of life.

Lorne Brown 

Let’s repeat that. Don’t gossip about them in the hours and days before they go, is what I just heard. And say nice kind things, things you’re grateful for as they go on this journey

Lisa Smartt 

Fight about who’s going to get the Porsche. Right.

I mean, that kind of stuff that people do, they’ll fight as a loved one is dying about things that. And we know that people hear almost everything, and we know that from people who have gone to comas, I’ve had near death experiences. So just know that you can be heard on many levels. The way I think about it is as a linguist, I was trained that if I hear a foreign language to keep curious and make notes and just keep an open mind. I would never say, “Oh, Chinese is a bunch of bullshit, but English is perfect.” Every language is. I’m sorry, I just

Lorne Brown

Swore.You’re allowed to swear on our podcast.

Lisa Smartt 

Every language is correct. Every language, one language isn’t better than the. French isn’t better than German. German isn’t better than Hebrew. All languages are whole and have integrity. So when you walk into the room of someone you love who’s dying, just know that the language that they’re speaking is in itself whole. Have faith in it. And you might want to write things down because like your dream, sometimes you can look back and go, oh my God, I think they were telling me something that there were hidden jewels in what they were saying. And that’s not always true, but sometimes. So if you can, I had a blessing of being trained as a linguist because my relationship to language is very just curious and knowing that no language is better than another. And to open your heart to nonsense, because Lewis Carroll did it now it’s in Wonderland.

Why can’t our parents do it? It’s a hard time when we lose someone we love, there’s a lot of grief and stuff. But if you really believe that there’s something beyond this world, see how you can enter it with them and through them and just love them. Just love them. And it’s not always easy. I know.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. It’s not always easy, but set the intention. Simple but not easy in many things in life.

Lisa Smartt 

But language is a good door and meditation’s another good door. Faith language. Enter what Eben talks about the non-linguistic too

Lorne Brown 

Lisa, thank you so much for this. I’ve enjoyed our conversation and I want to let people know where they can learn more about you as well. I have your final words project.org. We’ll put that in the notes. Is that the best place or do you have other places where people can find out about you and what you’re doing?

Lisa Smartt

Yeah, I work with lifeafterlife.com. I’m kind of on the team there. And also after a few years absence, I’m going back to book coaching, coaching people who want to write books. I’m mostly interested in spiritual kind of people’s spiritual journeys and I love coaching people to write. I also write. So if anyone’s interested, smartt coaching, S-M-A-R-T-T, coaching@gmail.

Lorne Brown 

Wait, let’s say that again because smarts with two Ts. So smartcoaching@gmail.com. So that’s the email. One more time. We’re going to put in the show notes. I want to make sure we hear it properly.

Lisa Smartt

Thank you. Smarttcoaching@gmail.com. If you have a book close to your heart, especially spiritual memoirs, my passion and lifeafterlife.com. I’m involved with that. That’s Raymond Moody’s wonderful website. And then finally finalwordsproject.org where you can bring your stories of final words.

Lorne Brown 

And we’ll put all that in the show notes. Lisa, thank you for joining us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Lisa Smartt 

Me too. Thanks. It was a pleasure.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.