Spiritual Care on Death Row

There’s a man I know. He’s 59 years old, and he is going to die.

We’re all going to die, of course, but this man can count his remaining days on all 10 fingers and only four toes.

This man has also been counting his final days for the last 20 years. That’s over 7,200 X’s on the calendar, and now just 14 left to go.

Imagine that for a second, knowing the exact date and time of your death.

But that’s not all. This man knows the where, the why, the how and, most importantly, the because.

You see, on November 30, by order of the state of Oklahoma, Phillip Dean Hancock is scheduled to be executed by means of lethal injection.

I know Phil because, for the last 10 months, I’ve been his chaplain, his spiritual care adviser who will be in the room with him during the execution.

Despite all the certainties of that day, I have never, ever in my entire life been so uncertain about what that day is going to ask of me.

The story actually begins back in 2015, when I had the bright idea to host a podcast about death.

The hypothesis of The Adventures of Memento Mori was that if I could face my mortality, then that would enable me to live the most deliberate life possible.

Memento mori. Carpe diem.

So I set out to prove that theory and face my mortality in public, with sound effects.

The funny thing about death, or at least hosting a podcast about death, is that the more you think you know, the more you realize you don’t know that much.

What started as an innocent intellectual curiosity turned into a full-blown existential scavenger hunt that was going very smoothly for about three years.

Then things took a dramatic spiritual left turn, and her name is Reverend Trudi Hirsch-Abramson.

I was interviewing Trudi about Buddhist beliefs in the afterlife. After a very lovely, long conversation, she looked at me and said, “You know, you would make a good chaplain.”

It’s important to know that besides being a Zen master of the White Plum Asanga, Trudi was also a chaplain instructor.

I don’t know if chaplain recruitment numbers were down that year, but when she said that, I told her there was one fundamental flaw in her idea.

I said, “Me, a chaplain? I can’t, because I don’t believe in God.”

Trudi said, “Well, neither do I. The question is, what do you believe in? Why don’t you sit with that and let it stew?”

When the Zen master tells you to sit and stew, you sit and stew.

The funny thing about beliefs is that they’re not facts. Beliefs require you to commit to something without evidence, and that’s a hard concept to accept, especially for a skeptic.

I like facts. I love proof. Leaps of faith are not my strong suit.

But sure enough, I sat and I stewed.

Then the next thing you know, the breadcrumbs started to appear. The breadcrumbs turned into bread loaves, and then the next thing you know, I was sending out an application to seminary school to become a chaplain.

The job of a chaplain is to provide spiritual care to care seekers within a secular institution, such as hospitals, colleges, universities and prisons.

I learned a lot in theology school, but one thing they didn’t have on the curriculum was spiritual care.

So for my chaplain internship at Bellevue Hospital during a global pandemic, never had I ever felt so uncertain about what that moment was going to ask of me.

I did, however, know what I believed in at that point.

All that sitting and stewing led me to humanity. I believe that every person has the potential to be and do good beyond themselves.

My religion was humanism.

Humanism is a life stance that empowers people to live fulfilled lives using rational thinking, dignity and ethical responsibility to each other, our communities and the planet.

Sounds good, and it is good. But bridging the gap between humanism and spirituality was left up to me.

So there I was, a nontheist chaplain at Bellevue Hospital with a major case of impostor syndrome, trying to hopefully not get caught not knowing what I was doing.

This went on for a couple of weeks until the dots connected.

It happened one night in a room in the forensic unit. At Bellevue, forensic means that’s where incarcerated people from Rikers are transferred to receive medical treatment.

I walked up to the room and knocked on the door. A young man in the bed looked up at me, and I took that as a sign to take two steps in, very nervously.

Then I gave him my spiel at the time.

“Hi, I’m Chaplain Devin, your spiritual care support. May I offer you a meditation or a prayer?”

This young man, we’ll call him Mr. Jones, immediately said, “Yes. You can pray for my hemorrhoids.”

I laughed too because I thought it was a joke, until I realized it wasn’t.

Mr. Jones went on to tell me that at Rikers, they weren’t giving him any treatment. So to get treatment, he resorted to swallowing razor blades.

“Now,” he said, “they will listen to me.”

Mr. Jones went on and said, “You can pray, but it probably won’t do any good because God doesn’t listen to me anyway.”

He said that he actually believed God went out of his way to punish him.

Then he looked at me and said, “How could I be expected to love a God that doesn’t love me back?”

Mind you, I’m still in the doorway with absolutely no idea how to respond.

Do I tell him that he’s wrong and that God does love him? Do I let him know that I’m actually not a Christian?

Then, in that moment of fear and crisis, it hit me.

He had already told me how to respond.

So I bowed my head, and we prayed for his hemorrhoids. Then we prayed for his girlfriend. Then we prayed for his brother.

Then we spent about 20 minutes talking about all the suffering he had experienced in his life. We talked about all the love in his life.

Then, for another 20 minutes, together we just wrestled with his doubt.

No judgment. No analysis. No proselytizing.

The only thing I needed to believe in that room was his humanity.

That’s when things clicked for me.

I realized that spiritual care is the art of story listening.

Spiritual care is about getting in the patient’s boat and understanding how to contextualize their suffering and pain.

In divinity school, we learned that in crisis, people tend to make sense of the world through religion, mythology and symbolism.

At Bellevue, I learned that spiritual care is about helping people contextualize pain according to what is sacred to them.

But the funny thing about spiritual care is that once something clicks, there’s still something else you need to learn.

I learned that real fast on death row.

Religiously, Phillip Dean Hancock considers himself to be an antitheist.

Why would an antitheist need spiritual care, you ask?

One of the things you should know about Phil is that, besides being able to recite Dante and Blake and every lyric to every Slayer song ever written, he also has the Bible practically memorized.

Like Mr. Jones at Bellevue, Phil sees his pain as evil and sees it through the lens of religion.

For months, every day on our phone calls, he would recite scripture better than any minister I’ve ever heard on a Sunday morning.

Phil recites scripture, and I’m there taking notes, trying to figure out what he’s really saying.

This went on for months until finally, I just got exhausted.

I was exhausted from not knowing what to do. Exhausted from feeling like this was way over my head.

To be honest with you, I didn’t feel that I was helping him in any way prepare for an execution.

So I called Zen Master Trudi, and I asked her for advice.

She said, “Just ask Phil what he wants you to do. It’s that simple.”

So I did. I asked Phil.

His response was immediate: “Show me something real. Show me something true.”

Two weeks from today, Phil will die. Technically, he will be murdered.

The thing I can show him, the thing that is real, is that I am uncertain.

I am unsure what that day is going to ask of me, and I am definitely unsure what it is asking of him.

But I can also show him that I’ve befriended my uncertainty.

There’s power in befriending your uncertainty because it keeps you open. It keeps you open, and it makes you stand at attention.

The realest thing in life and in death is uncertainty.

Compassion is the truest thing that I can show Phil.

In spiritual care, if empathy is walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, compassion is walking a mile with them in it, holding their hand.

Compassion doesn’t ask you to understand. It just says, “Hey, show up with your heart open.”

Show me something real. Show me something true.

Befriending uncertainty and leading with compassion is not easy. It doesn’t make the fear go away, and it does require you to take a leap of faith.

But if you do it, I promise you this: There’s magic in it, even if you’re a skeptic like me.

There’s a man I know. His name is Phil Hancock.

Thank you.