Book Review: "Words at the Threshold".

When I was a teenager I worked part time for three years  as a nurse’s aide. I planned to study Theater in college, not Nursing like my mother hoped, but I agreed to join her at the convalescent home where she worked since she pushed it on me so vigorously.

“Just work there as a bed maker,” she said. I gave in, and was lured in further by how much more the aides got paid. My cousin Betty worked there as well; soon I joined them as a nurse’s aide, cleaning and caring for the usually delightful, sometimes demanding, always vulnerable geriatric patients at Arden House.

I’m grateful for that experience. It taught me about growing old, being compassionate, and the sacredness of the dying process. I recall some touching conversations I had with the lucid patients, and the many maddening statements of the dementia patients who constantly spoke of “going home” or “packing up for the big trip” that never happened.

Reading Lisa Smartt’s Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We’re Nearing Death (New World Library, 2017) reminded me of how important being at the bedside of the dying is, not just physically, but being present to hear what they had to say about passing into Spirit. I also learned that talk of “packing for a big trip” isn’t as it seems.  

In her introduction, Lisa speaks of working with the father of near-death experience Dr. Raymond Moody, and establishing the “Final Words Project” in 2014. Over the next few years, she collected from hospice caregivers and family members the often nonsensical words uttered by terminally-ill patients during their end-of-life experiences.

Lisa, who studied Linguistics at UC Berkeley, analyzed the language for information on how our consciousness changes as we near death. As a linguist, Lisa was trained “to seek patterns in language, no matter how unintelligible the language is.”

She began the project after she was startled by how her father began speaking of “angels” as he got closer to his final days. In fact, one day he predicted he would die as the angels said he had only “three days left.”

Three days later Lisa’s father, a lifelong religious skeptic, embraced the angels and passed into Spirit.

~

There are lists of famous last words. My favorite is Steve Jobs’ incredulous “Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!” It’s reported that Thomas Edison said, upon emerging from a coma, “It is very beautiful over there.”

Mediums relay messages which sometimes touch on the beauty of the dimensions beyond the veil, so to read that such descriptions are uttered by those on the threshold of life and death was not surprising. The dying are offered glimpses of the after-world, and enjoy visits from their loved ones in Spirit, to help prepare them for the journey.  

What I found interesting was that the topics of our end-of-life speech may seem bizarre, but they are still inextricably linked to our lives. I asked Lisa about what she discovered regarding recurring symbolism.

“Symbols,” she said, “have many meanings and are subjective and much more flexible and evolving.”

“This evolutionary quality appears in several samples I received in the language of the dying,” she continued. “Remarkably, during a time when the brain should be losing all capacity to track details, there are accounts of the dying telling symbolic stories, or allegories, or having visions--these occur over days or weeks.”

“So, for example, someone might have an ongoing narrative about a train leaving the station…and this trip evolves in fascinating ways.” She explained that such phrases will make no sense to the caregivers as they are heard out of context.

“However, interestingly, if one is tracking what the dying person says over a period of days and weeks, you can see stories or narratives evolving that are often symbolic, many times involving travel, or sometimes visitations of the unseen.”

Lisa advises the average caregiver to be alert to visions, visitations, symbols, and the nonsensical mutterings of their loved ones because they have a more profound meaning than they will know. As the film reviewer Roger Ebert communicated to his wife, the world is “an elaborate hoax.” What a revealing line from a man who studied illusions projected on screens throughout his life.

Lisa Smartt’s own intuition opened whilst she witnessed her father’s last days and worked through her Words at the Threshold project. She expressed her gratitude for the work of mediums as people who “stand in both worlds at once.”

“It is such a rich mystery, and I am in awe of all the ways we humans communicate,” she said. “The main thing I have learned so far is that as we die, human communication expresses itself in so many ways that are only evident subtly while we are healthy and living...and that we humans have many ways of commenting with each other and with Source.”

If you’re a medium who appreciates the value of imparting Spirit’s words as naturally as can be whilst standing in their world, you will gain much from reading this wonderful book.