As a journalist and someone well acquainted with loss, I was fascinated by accounts of end-of-life visions and convinced that the phenomenon raised certain questions that could be meaningfully answered. Specifically: how these visions shaped the experience of dying, both for the person departing and for their caregivers and loved ones. My interest in the topic led me to Chris Kerr, a veteran physician and the chief medical officer for the nonprofit organization Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo. Kerr’s groundbreaking research and decades-long experience caring for dying patients were central to the project I reported on end-of-life dreams and visions, or ELDVs. The submissions came from ... all kinds of people and from places all over the world. A Post analysis of the submissions found that ... roughly a quarter of the entries included a dying person who saw their deceased mother; about one-fifth saw a sibling. Slightly fewer people reported visions of deceased fathers and spouses. Pets made appearances, too. There was the elderly woman whose last words were a single, repeated refrain, spoken to someone only she could see: “I need you, Mama.” There was the man who looked at his daughter just before he stopped breathing, his voice brightening as he told her: “Everyone’s waiting.” Through their dreams and visions, [Kerr's] patients have processed long-buried traumas and reconnected with those they’d been missing; Kerr has seen hospice patients experience profound emotional growth as well as clinically significant relief from mental and physical suffering. Through this experience at the end of their lives, he said, it feels “like they are being put back together.”