✨Will I be alone at the end?

There is one experience none of us will avoid.

And for something so universal, we rarely talk about it.

Dr. Christopher Kerr is a hospice physician who has sat with thousands of people in their final days. Over 27 years, he and his team asked more than 1,500 patients what they were experiencing as they neared the end.

One thing came up again and again.

The people they had loved, the ones already in soul form, came to them. Not everyone from their lives. The ones who had truly loved and held them.

Oprah put it simply in a recent conversation with him:

"The people show up who loved you."

Here is the part that thrills me.

Kerr's patients don't call these experiences dreams. When he uses that word, some of them are almost offended. No, they tell him. This was real. This was happening.

And they never ask him what it means.

There is no room for analysis, he says, because they already know.

I sat with that for a while.

Because that knowing, the kind that arrives whole before the mind has a chance to explain it away, is not something saved for our last days.

Some of you are feeling it already. A sense of presence. A moment you can't quite account for, and can't quite dismiss either.

You don't have to wait until the end to trust what you sense.

Many of you have sat beside someone as they were leaving this life. Maybe you watched them reach toward someone you couldn't see. Maybe they grew calm in a way that surprised you. Maybe something was said, or something was simply understood.

If a moment like that has stayed with you, I would love to hear about it.