I’m an atheist. My wife was an atheist too, with occasional lapses. She had serious medical issues, was hospitalized many times, and twice she met with a hospital chaplain. I was with her for both sessions, at her request.
At her meeting with the first chaplain, she said that she was an atheist, and asked why her health was so ragged when she’d done nothing to deserve it. The chaplain offered platitudes, and we weren’t impressed.At the second meeting, with a different chaplain in a different hospital a few years later, she called herself an agnostic instead of an atheist, and gave him an extensive list of reasons why God, if he existed, was an absolute piece of shit.
The chaplain didn’t say much in God’s defense, and it was actually kind of hilarious. But she also said she wasn’t sure about anything, and they talked about Pascal’s Wager.
After I brought her home from the hospital that time, and her health got better, we had some conversations where she told me she could see the appeal of belief. “You don’t have to wonder why. You don’t have to ponder the big questions, or the little questions, or anything at all. You just accept it all for the glory of Big Daddy in the Sky.”
“So,” I asked her as a joke, “Do you want to go to church on Sunday?”
“No,” she answered emphatically. “And I still don’t believe in anything about religion.”
Long pause.
“But,” she continued, “something goes sideways every few months with my health, and I’m back in a hospital again. Some time when I’m there in that horrible place, and they tell me again that my prognosis is poor, I might want to see a third chaplain. Is that OK?”
“Sweet Jesus,” I answered. “Of course it’s OK. You’re my wife and I love you, and I’d love you even if you started sending tithes to Franklin Graham.”
“I’m not doing that, not ever.”
Fast forward several years, and my wife was recently in the hospital again. After a week and a half in Intensive Care, her heart stopped in the middle of the night, and despite the best efforts of fourteen doctors and nurses huddled around her bed shouting orders and performing CPR, I saw the MDs and RNs making eye contact with each other.
One of the nurses asked if I wanted them to keep trying, and I asked if there was any real chance.
She told me the pounding of the CPR had already broken several bones in Stephanie’s chest, and that no, she’d never seen anyone come back from this point.
“Then I guess you ought to stop,” I said, and with that, all the action came to an end, and so did Stephanie.
Next they asked if I wanted to be alone with her, and I did (and still do). Someone put a chair behind me, and I sat down, took my wife’s hand, and told her goodbye
with tears running all over my face.
A chaplain stepped into the room, and politely asked if I’d like him to say the last rites. I’m so unreligious I didn’t really know what the last rites are, beyond a cliché from TV shows, but I remembered what my
wife had told me, that she might want to see a chaplain again, so I said yes.
He recited the 23rd Psalm while I continued blubbering to my wife. And then, as the monitors over her bed beeped and flatlined, the chaplain asked if there was anything else he could do.
I completely forgot that he’d done the last rites, so I said, “I think she might want you to read her the last rites,” and he recited the 23rd Psalm again.
So my atheist or agnostic wife left this world while a guy in a silly outfit read scriptures in King James English, twice.
And I’m OK with all of it, except for the part where my wife died.I don’t believe in anything but love, and know that I’ll never see the woman I love again. Not in Heaven, not in Hell, only in my memories, but they’re damned good memories.
When it’s my turn to die, I’ll probably want nothing to do with Big Daddy in the Sky. No fairy tales for me, please — but I reserve the right to change my mind at the very, very last moment.
And I don’t judge anyone who reaches out for a god in the darkest of dark times. I don’t hate religion. So long as you don’t use your God to make other people miserable, go in peace. When you’re desperate, take
whatever comfort you can find.
I’m pretty sure my beloved Stephanie was already gone by the time the chaplain walked in, but if in any real sense she was still there, still reaching for something, I hope she found it.
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9/10/2018
Republished: 5/6/2023
Republished: 1/3/2025
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