Pray Go On

I’m not Jewish, but I married a Jewish woman, raised my children Jewish, played on our temple’s softball team, and was a comedy writer in Hollywood for 45 years, so for all practical purposes I could be buried in Jerusalem. The tab for my stepson’s bar mitzvah alone qualifies me as a Righteous Gentile.

Now, I was raised a Christian by parents who actually tried to live by the teachings of Jesus, so when I became old enough to recognize the bigotry, violence and greed of many of our fellow congregants who professed to worship the champion of love, peace, and self-privation, I found myself gradually becoming agnostic. Or, more accurately, agnostish, which is to say, I don’t believe it’s possible for we lowly humans to know if there is a Supreme Being or not, but I’m not even sure about that. Up until recently, the equivocation of my personal religious credo hadn’t been especially germane to anything or anyone, including me. But then, last year, I found out I needed to have quintuple bypass surgery. Nothing like defining your personal philosophy about the existence of God, the human soul and the possibility of an afterlife while a doomsday clock is ticking down on you like the ditty in Final (literally!) Jeopardy.

And your answer is …?

I’ve never been able to pray, whatever that is. I remember trying to back when I was a kid in church but always kept hearing TV theme songs in my head. I can think, and I can think with my eyes closed and I can sleep. I assume praying is somewhere in between those things, only probably without the “Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da BATMAAAN!” The most accurate description of praying I’ve ever seen is in Hamlet: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

The hospital where my surgery was to be performed is co-owned by two major healthcare entities, Providence and Cedars-Sinai. Providence is a Catholic organization and Cedars-Sinai, of course, is Jewish. And so, I found myself sitting in the eerily-echoey surgical waiting area beneath a wall featuring both a cross and a mezuzah. There was no star-and-crescent of Islam, but the heart surgeon to whom I was entrusting my life was Arab-American. Actually, I don’t know for sure he was an Arab nor what his religion was, only that his people apparently hailed from some Middle Eastern country that wasn’t Israel. Regardless, it was absolutely fine with me, as he was purportedly the best in Los Angeles: calm, reassuring, 50-something, fit, well-spoken but brief, and just cocky enough to make it clear he was the smartest guy in the room without needing to prove it. My anesthesiologist was Jewish, which was also fine with me, as long as they didn’t start squabbling about Gaza mid-operation. I just hoped no one mispronounced “gauze.”

Anyway, I guess I should’ve felt that I had all the spiritual bases covered but instead felt more like I was spread a little thin, faith-wise. Whichever religion turned out to have the Real McGod, He’d presumably be omniscient enough to know about my waiting room bet-hedging. So, once I was wheeled into the OR, I remember looking around for something that carried with it the imprimatur of Meaning. After all, this might be the last thing I saw in this life! But unless the frame of an air vent has some symbolism that escaped me, it didn’t seem likely. I closed my eyes…

Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da-Da BATMAAAN!

Then my anesthesiologist put a mask over my face. If I died, I wondered, would I see a white light summoning me, or hear a vaguely female voice whispering to me that it wasn’t your time yet, my child? Would I find myself hovering over myself on the operating table? Or would the Nothingness I felt just keep on nothing-ing. It’s entirely likely that what I was feeling – not feeling – was it. Or rather It.

Then again, it’s possible that when what’s left of your conscious mind vanishes, you have the same kind of bizarre dreams you have when your mind is drifting through the psychological netherworld of REM sleep. Maybe my last thoughts on Earth would be of slaloming down a gigantic plastic flume ride while sitting on a rotisserie chicken the size of a beach ball (again).

Or maybe our minds return to what it was like when we were babies, since it would make sense that the end of your life is a bookend to the beginning and that you ultimately dream about whatever you were dreaming about in the womb. And since the only fetal memories you could possibly have had were of the miraculous genesis of your own creation, you’ll see whatever God is. And it would be logical to assume that that metaphysical image – of God or heaven or the seminal heart of the universe – is profoundly wonderful compared to the sterile world of coldness and noise and fluorescent light and rubber gloves that we all suddenly find ourselves, squalling like shanghaied mini-sailors, yanked into.

But finally, what I thought about in that OR was what I’d thought about the night before. I was sitting in my backyard at dusk, watching a mourning dove perched upon a power line as it called to a second dove, who called back. That had led me to ponder something that comedy writers rarely do, given the professional necessity of focusing on the many, many negative aspects of the human experience: I’d thought about good things. Specifically, any memory that made me feel that first-sip-of-whiskey warmth deep in my gut. 

Anything: watching my grandpa tap maple trees in the woods behind his farm; the chill of October ending the summer sweatbox as my best friend and I played a gloriously pointless game of trying to catch falling leaves; snuggling against my father by a campfire; watching the distant Appalachians transmute from green to blue to purple as I drove toward and then through them on my way west to California; running down a sunlit street after I’d asked out a girl who’d said yes; standing on the rooftop of a chi-chi hotel in Hollywood at an Emmy gala while looking down to see the first seedy apartment building I’d moved into half a lifetime ago; my tiny daughter giddily face-planting on our bed one Saturday morning as my wife and I played assistant directors, calling: “Bring in the stunt baby!” On and on, memory upon memory, each triggering another, until the Niagara Falls of joy redefined my life for me. Amidst all the miseries, like sunflowers sprouting from horse manure, there had been more good than I’d ever allowed myself to be truly aware of. So much good that I wanted to live long enough to have just one more memory, yet I couldn’t help feeling okay about my stretch on Earth if there weren’t any more. It’s possible that what I did in that moment was what praying is. Maybe my words had finally flown up, who knows?

What I do know is that the time it took you to read my blathering just now was about as long as it felt like before I woke up from my five-hour operation. There in the Cardiac ICU, looking down on me, were my Jewish wife and my Arab surgeon. Along with the hospital’s ubiquitous symbols of Jesus’ agonizing torture and Moses’ impossibly-exacting commandments from God. Both mounted on the wall alongside a TV. The symbol of my life spent in the noble but mostly futile pursuit of creating something better.

And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. It could use some punching up, but it was very good. 

Andy Guerdat is a film and television writer-producer.