Around 10 p.m., my phone rang, and suddenly, an uneasy feeling washed over me. I picked up, almost instinctively, and asked, "What's wrong?"

On the line was the girl Erin had been dating. She quickly explained that Erin had passed out, prompting her to call 911. Erin had come to briefly, but now the EMTs were working on her, and they were on their way to the hospital. She wanted to keep me informed and promised to call back once they arrived.

I hung up, aware that five sets of concerned eyes were fixed on me, waiting. My throat tightened as I struggled to find words. No one asked questions; we all seemed to understand the gravity of the moment. The seconds stretched into what felt like hours as I stared at the phone, willing it to ring again, bracing for whatever news might come next.

I didn't dare to move from the couch. I didn't trust my legs to carry me. Instead, I just sat there, clutching Nico against my chest, too anxious to even look at him properly, as if holding him was the only thing keeping me anchored.

45 agonizing minutes later, it rang. It pierced through the stillness and sent a shock through the room. Everything fell deathly silent as I answered, all eyes on me, everyone holding their breath. I pressed the phone to my ear, and the quiet that followed felt surreal, the kind of silence that only deepens the blow.

She could barely get the words out, but she didn't need to. I knew. I felt my insides twist as the reality settled in, each of her labored breaths like another knife twisting in the wound. I hung up without saying anything else, my heart a void.

I haven't been the same since that night. For years, I didn't have language for what happened in the moments before that second phone call. I knew, before she said a word, and I have never been able to explain how.

It turns out this has a name.

It's called a Shared Death Experience, or SDE. Dr. Raymond Moody, the researcher who coined the term "near-death experience" decades ago, later turned his attention to accounts like mine. He spent years collecting stories from people who were nowhere near their loved one's physical body and reported sensing the moment of death anyway. His research became the book Glimpses of Eternity, and it was the first time I saw my own experience reflected back at me in someone else's careful documentation rather than dismissed as coincidence or grief playing tricks.

An SDE can present as a physical sensation, a pain or pressure in the body that mirrors what the dying person is going through. Sometimes it presents as a shift in the room, or in reality itself, the way I felt it. It can also show up a wave of peace that arrives from nowhere, disconnected from any news yet received. In other instances, people report something more vivid: a sense of traveling briefly with the person who is dying, perceiving light, or feeling surrounded by a presence that wasn't there a moment before.

These accounts share a shape, even when the people telling them have never spoken to each other, live in different countries, and hold entirely different faiths or if they have no faith at all. What strikes me most, reading through these accounts, is how consistently people describe not wanting to say it out loud at first. There's a kind of shame attached to it, a fear of sounding unstable or grief-stricken beyond reason. I understand that fear because I ruminated on my own experience for a long time before I gave it any language at all, and even longer before I said it to anyone besides my husband and best friend.

A few ways people have tried to explain it

There is no single accepted answer, and I don't think there needs to be one. However, a few threads are worth naming, because each one holds a piece of the truth as far as I can tell.

The neurological and psychological explanation that grief sharpens attention. People who are deeply bonded to someone may become highly attuned to subtle cues, tone of voice, timing, the small details that slip past us on an ordinary day. Memory also has a way of reorganizing itself around a moment once we know what that moment meant. Some researchers see SDEs as the mind's way of making meaning under extreme emotional weight, a kind of retroactive pattern-finding that happens once we already know the outcome. This explanation is comfortable for people who want a grounded, biological account, and it may well be part of what's happening. It doesn't fully satisfy me, but I hold it as an honest possibility among several.

The consciousness explanation.

Other researchers and philosophers propose that consciousness may not be strictly local, bound to one body in one place at one time. If minds are connected in ways science does not fully understand, a sensed shift the moment someone dies would not be so strange. This remains a minority position in mainstream science, but it has not been dismissed either, and serious researchers continue to study it. Something is happening in these accounts that a purely mechanical view of the mind struggles to fully explain, and I think that gap is worth exploring rather than rushing to dismiss.

The spiritual explanation.

Long before anyone gave this a clinical name, most cultures and faiths already held the belief that a person's spirit or energy can be felt at the moment it leaves the body. Grandmothers and elders in almost every tradition would tell you they have always known this, without needing a research paper to confirm it. Many West African and diasporic traditions speak of the ancestors making themselves known at the veil. Many Indigenous traditions describe the same. Western science is only now catching up to naming what a great deal of the world never doubted in the first place.

I do not know which of these is true, or if the real answer is some combination none of us have even considered yet. I have made peace with not knowing. What I know without question is that on the night my sister passed on, something moved through me before I had any reason to know it should, and that experience reshaped how I move through the world and how I do this work today.

I think about the version of me who sat on that couch, waiting for the phone to ring, and I wonder if some part of her already knew what the rest of her hadn't caught up to yet. I wonder how many of us carry these moments without ever naming them, filing them away as strange or unexplainable and moving on because there's no room in an ordinary day to sit with something that doesn't fit.

If this has happened to you, I'd like to hear about it. We are not as separate from on another as the physical distance between us suggests. I felt that truth the hard way, and I have spent every year since trying to help other people feel less alone in it.

Until the end,
Kema