John Edward has opened up about why he believes no one truly dies alone.
The longtime medium, 54, shared his views on deathbed experiences during an appearance on the Jay Shetty Podcast. Edward, who rose to fame through talk show appearances and his own series Crossing Over with John Edward, drew from both his professional work and personal loss to explain what he thinks happens in life’s final moments.
His perspective was shaped deeply by his mother’s death. Edward recalled sitting in his car shortly after she passed, looking up at the window of the room where she had died. “Nobody’s ever going to care what time I come home again,” he remembered thinking. The sudden absence of boundaries forced him to confront a new reality, and that personal grief eventually led him to discuss how people experience their final moments.
Edward addressed a common fear: passing away in an empty hospital room. He reassured listeners that the physical circumstances do not reflect the full picture of what occurs. “So, what I want everybody to know is that nobody dies alone – when we leave the physical world, nobody passes alone, and you might say that’s not true because nobody was there,” he said.
“I mean that people come for us – we have loved ones and friends that are waiting for us that are there. And if you’re at someone’s deathbed, they may do things where they’re having deathbed visions – they may call out to a person,” Edward continued. “You may sense that yourselves, there’s always people that come for us. So if you were not able to be with the person when they transitioned, please know that they were not alone. There’s always people, sometimes pets that come for us – so nobody passes alone.”
He added that loved ones who try to maintain constant presence at a deathbed may find their efforts unexpectedly thwarted. “And you could set up a schedule to make sure that grandma is not alone and that everybody’s going to be with her – she’ll never be alone,” he noted.
“That one moment where grandma was alone may be where grandma transitions, and the reason why is people will choose who they want to be with when they pass. And if it’s too painful to leave while that person’s there, they’ll wait till that person’s not,” Edward explained. “So if you were not able to be there, please don’t take offense to that. Don’t think that you failed them. They may not have been able to pass with you in the room because they loved you too much.”
The medium also offered a concise framing of mourning itself, telling Shetty’s audience that “grief is the other side of love.” Edward has spent over four decades working in his field, building a career that moved from talk show circuits to his own television platform.