What helps someone who is afraid of dying?
Often not answers about the illness, but a settled sense of what comes next. Voggenhuber describes a young woman with a terminal diagnosis who came to him not for healing but to find out whether she could stop being afraid.
Fear of dying is rarely addressed directly. Medical conversations centre on treatment, and people around the dying person often steer away from the subject entirely, hoping not to make things worse.
Pascal Voggenhuber tells one story that stayed with him. His office received a request from a woman of twenty-three with a terminal illness, asking to be moved forward in a waiting list that ran for years. Moving someone forward meant fitting them into his own free time, so it was a real decision.
His first reaction was that she had come to the wrong person. He assumed she was hoping to be made well, and while he had learned energy work, he did not consider that his field. Then he reconsidered: perhaps that was not what she wanted at all. He said yes.
The session itself was unremarkable by his standards. Her grandmother came through. Everything between them was already settled, and he said so. She confirmed it. He sat there for a moment wondering why he had made an emergency appointment for a conversation with nothing to resolve.
Then the grandmother explained. The young woman was not there because something was unfinished. She was there because she was afraid of dying, and she wanted to find out whether there was anything afterwards, so that she could die calmly. He explained what he understood about that, and she confirmed that this was exactly why she had come.
She told him afterwards that it was the greatest gift she had received, and that she was no longer afraid. She went home. Two days later her parents called to say she had died in her sleep, and that her final two days had been peaceful.
What he takes from it is a definition of healing that does not involve a cure. Healing, in his account, can mean that a person's fear settles and they can go without dread. He is explicit that he has had far more spectacular sessions, and that this one moved him more than any of them.
He describes something similar in children with terminal illnesses, whom he met while raising money for a children's hospice. What struck him was how often children of five, six or seven who knew they were dying ended up comforting their own parents and the adults around them.
The practical point is small and worth keeping. What a frightened person needs is not always information about their illness. Sometimes it is permission to talk about the fear itself, with someone who will not flinch.