Logic Falls Short

This was a powerful post on Sullivan's blog from a reader.  It reflects my own experience as a pastor who often sits with dying parishioners.  It also reflects the way I feel after watching my mother and my father-in-law die in the last 17 months.

I may have missed the boat on this discussion, but I wanted to email you something since I may have an interesting perspective. I have been a registered nurse caring for hospice patients for the last two years. During these two years I've had pretty much a front row seat to some of the most amazingly touching things that I've ever seen in my life ; and some of the most horrific. I have held hands of people as they drew their last breath and plenty of times have had to look up from my stethoscope on a patients chest into the eyes of a family member and tell them that their loved one has passed.

I came into this experience as an agnostic who often had leanings to atheism, but while working with hospice patients my faith in something has been restored. When you are with someone as they die, you feel something. I can't say what it is. There is the remarkable, palpable feeling of departure. No flashes of light, no bursts of choral music, but it is felt. Even when you are not present at the moment of death, when you see someone alive and moments later see them dead, there is an overwhelming feeling that that person is not there.

An experienced nurse had a good way of putting it after I had seen my first patient die (and the first dead body I had ever seen), she said "you really see that we are just flesh animated by spirit". Other things that have caused me to doubt my doubt are things like every so often getting patients who will report visitations from long dead loved ones, and proceed to die a short time after.

In the beginning, the skeptical part of my brain tried to explain these things away. Perhaps the human brain isn't used to seeing a perfectly motionless human face? Perhaps we pick up on micro movements even when people are sleeping that are so strange when they are absent on the face of the dead. Could that be the reason there is an immense feeling of the person being gone? Could visitations by long dead loved ones be caused by alterations in brain chemistry combined with a brain desperately trying to cope and rationalize what its going through?

After nights sitting up, holding hands, listening to past life stories, pushing morphine, consoling ... there came a time when I felt that perhaps logic falls short. Perhaps the human/ the heart is an adequately calibrated measure to detect the divine. Now I say I believe in "the great I don’t know." Something ... I don’t know what. Much better than nothing.