Those who report a near-death experience, Barbato points out, live to tell their story. “This number may therefore be the tip of an iceberg, with many, and possibly the majority, of death-bed visions going unnoticed”. “I, like many, suspect the incidence of death-bed visions increases as death approaches, but loss of consciousness or sheer fatigue get in the way of these visions being shared”, Barbato notes. But he points out that this is “almost certainly an underestimation” of the number of experiences, as his study only included reports from the patient or next-of-kin. In a small study he carried out in the 1990s, Barbato found that about 20 to 30 percent of patients reported a death-bed vision.
When I spoke to palliative care physician Michael Barbato about this strange disconnect, he suggested that the fundamental difference might be that with NDEs, we have a returned ‘hero’ (that is, as the subject of the archetypal “hero’s journey”), while with end-of-life experiences the subject actually does pass away, unable to continue talking about what happened to them. And yet, once I dug into the topic, it was every bit as fascinating as the NDE literature. And yet, while near-death experiences are often covered by the media, and have had many best-selling books written about them, ELEs are very much the poorer cousin, with very little coverage in books and media.