A window to heaven

Thomas G. Long writes the following in his book What Shall We Say?: Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith. The quotations from Diane Komp are taken from her own book A Window to Heaven: When Children See Life in Death.

When Diane Komp, a pediatric cancer specialist now retired from Yale Medical School, was a young physician, she considered herself to be a "post-Christian doctor," a scientist who "vacillated between being an agnostic and an atheist" and who cared little about where she fell on that scale at any given moment. Her medical specialty called for her to care for children with cancer, some of them terminal. The first time she faced such a case, a child who was dying, she asked her clinical mentor how she, as a young doctor, should handle the emotional stress of encountering innocent suffering. The response was that she should forget her feelings and concentrate on her work. "Hard work;" her mentor said, "is a good tonic for untamed and uneasy feelings."

Komp quickly discovered the impossibility of this counsel. To treat her children patients effectively, she had to listen attentively to them, and to their parents, and to do that meant, over time, that she came to love them and to receive love from them. It also meant realizing that these children and their parents were struggling with far more than a biological disease. They were wrestling with questions about the meaning of suffering, life, and death. So Komp was caught in the same dilemma facing many pastors: she could not maintain an emotional detachment because she loved her patients and their families, but she had little to offer them in response to their non-medical questions of meaning. So, she decided to assume with her patients something akin to what clergy would call "a ministry of presence":

[I] did not pretend to have any handy theological solutions to people's existential dilemmas, but I could be a friend on the way. Many times I listened politely to parents who groped for God in their most painful hour. I respected them all for their journeys, but I heard no convincing evidence in their revelations to challenge my way of thinking. If I were to believe, I always assumed, it would require the testimony of reliable witnesses.

But then Komp found herself at the bedside of Anna. Anna became sick with leukemia when she was two. In the next few years, she received constant therapy, and there were times when she was disease-free. But at age seven, the leukemia had returned with an unforgiving vengeance, and this time Anna was facing the end. Komp gathered with Annas distraught parents and a hospital chaplain to comfort Anna in her last few minutes of life. She describes what happened:

Before she died, [Anna] mustered the final energy to sit up in her hospital bed and say, "The angels - they're so beautiful. Do you hear their singing? I've never heard such beautiful singing!" Then she laid back on her pillow and died.

Her parents reacted as if they had been given the most precious gift in the world. The hospital chaplain in attendance was more comfortable with the psychological than with the spiritual, and he beat a hasty retreat to leave the existentialist doctor alone with the grieving family. Together we contemplated a spiritual mystery that transcended our understanding and experience. For weeks to follow, the thought that stuck in my head was: Have I found a reliable witness?