Dr Christopher Kerr revealed a very telling sign that someone could be about to die (Picture: The Oprah Podcast) There are very few things you can be certain of in life — but one of those is that, one day, it will come to an end. Yep, however much you might try to cheat death, it comes to us all eventually. But, despite all the suggestions of life flashing before your eyes, can anyone really know with accuracy when their time might be up? Well, you might not be able to predict the exact moment of death but there are certain haunting signs which suggest that you could be about to shuffle off this mortal coil, with one end-of-life doctor revealing a common experience many of his patients have in the days before their death. According to Dr Christopher Kerr, a hospice and palliative care physician based in Buffalo, New York, many people who are close to the end have visions of deceased loved ones, or those who cared for them during their lives. And speaking in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, he said that those patients are convinced that what they see is no hallucination. He revealed his patients’ experiences to The Oprah Podcast (Picture: The Oprah Podcast) ‘Very little is said between the person in the dream and the dreamer, but everything seems to be understood,’ Dr Kerr explained. ‘And what I think is most fascinating, I’ve been doing it for 27 years. I’ve never had a patient ask me, “What do you think this means?”‘ He went on to explain that those patients who were dying knew which deceased loved ones had visited them and that those they might have had a difficult relationship with in life were not there. And a majority of those he spoke to claimed the interaction was positive, and provided people with reassurance of what would be waiting for them in the afterlife. Often the visions are of people that the dying person has unfinished business with (Picture: Shutterstock / sfam_photo) Dr Kerr, who has also authored the book Death Is But A Dream, based on 1,500 interviews with patients before they died, highlighted a specific example during the interview, which aired on The Oprah Podcast in July 2026. He spoke of a woman named Julie, whose mother Jean began seeing her own mother sitting in a chair in the room they were in. She recalled her mum saying: ‘Mom is sitting in the chair across the room and she is waiting for me, and she wants me to know that she’s going to be there for me.’ Jean’s account also saw her receive visits from her father, uncle and brother-in-law — and that she patched up a rocky relationship with her own mother before her death. Dying is a gradual process, according to Dr Kerr (Picture Shutterstock / UfaBizPhoto) She said of the encounters: ‘I was lying in bed, and people were walking very slowly by me. The right-hand side I didn’t know, but they were all very friendly, and they touched my arm or my hand when they went by. And the other side were people that I knew.’ While Dr Kerr was unable to say whether the visions were real or not, he noted that many of them seemed to address an unresolved issue in that person’s life, and that these visits gave patients the chance for ‘spiritual’ healing and closure before they passed away. ‘In the end, there’s this you’re almost put back together by being brought back to family,’ he explained. ‘You certainly carry loss. You’ve lost people who are lingering in your heart, and they come back to you. And so that’s a form of healing.’ He went on to explain that dying is a gradual process, and for most people death comes as part of a deepening sleep rather than when they are awake and alert. ‘People don’t die in an awake state. They die in the depths of sleep. And you can’t get there unless you’re comfortable. And everybody seems to have an understanding of that from a physical perspective,’ Dr Kerr explained. ‘But psychologically, existentially, you also have to find peace.’