Dr. Bennetts and I are talking about life after death, about hope, and about children's amazingly similar visions only hours, or moments, before they die.
Listening to children foretell their own deaths, and then hearing them comfort the parents they will leave behind, has changed Dr. Bennetts' life. Never in her 15 years of treating children with cancer has she found a child's premonition to be wrong.
When Geni Bennetts tells me some of these children's stories, her eyes, and my own, cloud with tears.
Seven-year-old Danny had leukemia. He was hospitalized at CHOC and was not expected to survive. His friend, Timmy, had died not long before.
Late one afternoon, Danny's mother was at his bedside as her son slept. When he awoke, Danny found his mother in tears.
"Don't cry," Danny told his mother. "Do you see my angel? She's outside my window. She's telling me that she is going to take me to Timmy. She says that Timmy and I are going to go fishing."
Danny died later that night.
Some of the children that Dr. Bennetts tells me about have come from religious homes; others have not. All of them have been on medication, but their visions, reported matter-of-factly between more prosaic talk of everyday life, belie the suggestion that they spring from a drug-induced haze.
"We in medicine have seen people hallucinating," Dr. Bennetts says. "It isn't like that. These children are perfectly lucid."
The number of children who have had peaceful visions of their own death is impossible to know. Dr. Bennetts, however, is not the first to publicly talk about them.
Dr. Diane Komp, a specialist in oncology and a professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, is writing a book about similar experiences with her young patients.
After publishing an article in Theology Today in October, 1988, which spawned further publicity, she says many parents wrote to tell her of their children's peaceful deaths after experiencing such visions--during their waking hours or in their dreams.
"I think the impartation of peace from these experiences is what has had the most impact on me," says Dr. Komp, who has been practicing medicine for almost 25 years.