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“A Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters With the Hereafter”

“A Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters With the Hereafter”

Last updated on: April 28, 2026 at 9:53 am by Dan Peterson

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“A Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters With the Hereafter” 2026-04-28T09:53:14-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Nashville Tennessee Temple (LDS.org)

This evening, I picked up my copy of a book written by one Reggie Anderson, with Jennifer Schuchmann, under the title of Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters With the Hereafter (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2013). At the time that the book was published, Dr. Anderson was a physician with the Frist Clinic in Nashville, Tennessee, while also serving as chief of staff of TriStar Ashland City Medical Center and as medical director of three area nursing homes. I presume that Dr. Anderson is not a Latter-day Saint.

With more than twenty-five years of emergency room and family practice experience, Reggie has been exposed to nearly every kind of death possible, including murder, suicide, death from old age, and death shortly after birth. His positive outlook and view that the next life is more real than this one has allowed him to hold dying and grieving patients’ hands, providing hope as he prepares them for the parting of the veil that separates this world from the next. (319)

The Celestial Room of the Idaho Falls Temple.
Please note the heavenly reunions depicted in the mural on the wall.

Almost immediately upon beginning the book, I noticed a passage that I’m sharing with you on this Sabbath evening:

Throughout medical school I had taken care of dying patients, but this was the first time that I, as the senior resident, would be the one in charge when a patient died. I didn’t know what to expect.

“Dr. Anderson,” the elderly woman began, her voice starting to fade, “Will you hold my hand? I’m going to see Jesus, and I need an escort.”

That night, I experienced the veil parting — the veil that separates this life from the next. As I held the dying woman’s hands, I felt the warmth of her soul pass by my cheek when it left her body, swept up by an inexplicably cool breeze in an otherwise stagnant room. I smelled the familiar fragrance of lilac and citrus, and I knew the veil was parting to allow her soul to pass through.

Since that first patient, I’ve walked with countless others to the doorstep of heaven and watched them enter paradise. On many occasions, as I held hands with the dying, God allowed me to peer into heaven’s entryway where I watched each patient slip into the next world.

I’ve sensed Jesus on the other side, standing in heaven’s foyer, welcoming the dead who are made whole again. I’ve glimpsed surreal colors and sights and heard sounds more intense than anything I’ve ever experienced in this ordinary world. I’ve inhaled the scents of lilac, citrus, freshly carved cedar, and baking bread — more fragrant than I ever thought possible.

Sometimes I’ve even witnessed patients leave this world and come back. As they’ve shared their stories with me, I’ve often remembered the time early in my life when God allowed me to step into heaven’s foyer, even though I no longer believed he was real.

The one thing these experiences have in common is the intensity of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and feelings that I sensed. Heaven is more real than anything we experience here, and the sense of peace, joy, and overwhelming love is beyond description. (4-5)

It’s not a Latter-day Saint book, but the language, thus far, is entirely consistent with Latter-day Saint beliefs and with Latter-day Saint attitudes toward death and the world to come.

Former friends Emma Smith and Brigham Young attempting to reconcile, as depicted in the 2024 Interpreter Foundation movie Six Days in August. Camrey Bagley Fox, who portrayed Emma, and John Donovan Wilson, who portrayed Brigham, are two of the three co-hosts in Interpreter’s Becoming Brigham series.

Thirteen episodes of Becoming Brigham have already gone up online. The fourteenth will be posted on Monday, Utah time. I hope that you’ve been enjoying them and that, if you have, you’ve been telling others about them, sharing them with family and friends and members of your ward, and so forth. If so, thank you!

The Taylorsville Utah Temple was dedicated on 2 June 2024 by Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

I found these interesting, and I think that perhaps some of you may, as well:

Forty-seven minutes from PragerU: “What Do Mormons Believe?/Theological: Did Jesus visit the Americas after the Resurrection? In this episode of Theological, host Shabbos Kestenbaum sits down with Santa Clarita stake president Michael Stanley of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to discuss the Book of Mormon’s most surprising claims—and answers the biggest misconceptions about Mormonism.”
On which Jacob Hess comments for the Deseret News: “PragerU’s podcast takes countercultural approach: Posing sincere questions to Latter-day Saint guest: ‘What in the world was Jesus doing in the Americas? Who was he talking to?’ the Jewish host asked. ‘Just just educate me’”
An article that was recently published by Christopher D. Cunningham in Meridian Magazine is also relevant in this context: “Who is a Mormon?”

The Snowflake Arizona Temple (LDS.org)

I close, as is my wont, with accounts of abominable religiously-motivated crimes that are drawn directly from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™:

And this appalling article, likewise retrieved from the seemingly inexhaustible Hitchens File, deserves special attention on its own: “Perspective: High demand or high reward? The debate over high religious expectations: Family scholars find religions that ask a lot tend to give back a lot — especially when devotion is accompanied by gentleness and patience”

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