On 26 February 2025 I listened to a fascinating programme on Radio 4, called The Rally presented by Emily Knight. Apparently the rally, or the last rally, is a phrase that describes a phenomenon often observed just before – sometimes hours or days before – death occurs. The person who has been silent and disengaged from the world suddenly expresses clearly and appropriately something to people near them. One lady in a hospice (featured in the programme) who had been unresponsive for a very long time and receiving end-of-life care, suddenly said to her daughter, sitting by her bed: ‘I truly love you’.
On the programme, the daughter of this lady is reported saying ‘this is the mum we know’.
Is this a little supporting evidence for my thesis that the ‘core’ person does not disappear and die as the medical professionals keep telling us? Could this ‘familiar mum’ have been ‘found’ earlier with appropriate conversational gambits as in the Amelesia Communicative programme?
Does the rally occur to a narrowly defined set of people who have been unconscious and on end-of-life care for quite sometime and suddenly appear to regain their mental ‘lucidity’ as they utter clear words and sentiments at, what some reserachers and others have observed to be, final moments of their life, before death occurs?
OR, is it a poorly understood phenomenon that can occur at other times to people living with degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s who are nowhere near end of life?
The radio 4 programme explores both questions by discussing it with several scientists involved in researching the phenomenon that comes under different names according to their discrete definitions such as terminal lucidity, paradoxical lucidity, rallying, terminal rally, the rally, end-of-life-experience, energy surge, the surge, or pre-mortem surge. It has even been called the Lazarus moment.
This phenomenon of ‘terminal lucidity’ has been coined by the German psychologist Michael Mahn who has been studying it for a long time. He has identified it as an area of cultural research going back centuries and present in all cultural contexts in the world, with specific linguistic and cultural definitions.
Current studies being carried out in the US, in the National Institute of Aging (NIA) are attempting to measure actual activity in the brain, recording audio and video events as they happen to try and identify and quantify and then describe these events.
However, the lead scientist in this programme is concerned that findings that suggest that ‘someone who was no longer there suddenly is…’ might give false hope to families’. He is reinforcing the received dogma that people living with deteriorating brain diseases have stopped being all-functioning human beings and therefore all hope of communicating with them should be abandoned.
WHY? What is wrong with the hope, for families, to know that the person they knew is damaged, in their brain, yes, but not completely unreachable? Why can’t we say that the ‘core person’ remains somewhere, and it’s up to us to find that person? Maybe we should reinforce the idea that ‘personhood’ is not always present as a complete entity but we present ourselves in bit parts most of the time? Depending on context? Who we are with? The role we are playing at any given moment?