Any healthcare professional will tell you that the most difficult part of the job is giving tragic news to family members, and sometimes the news is so sad that delivering the message can leave doctors shaken to their core. Sadly, this is the situation facing Dr. Lorena Flores, an oncologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago: She just had to give her patient’s family the bad news that their father didn’t make it into Heaven.
Absolutely heartbreaking. Delivering a message this painful could not have been easy for Dr. Flores.
When Dr. Flores’s patient Paul Carrol passed away after a year-long battle with liver cancer, she was forced to inform his wife and three children that he had failed to achieve eternal salvation in the Kingdom of Heaven, where the souls of the righteous dwell forever in paradise in the bosom of God Almighty. The sound of the Carrol family devolving into anguished sobs as Dr. Flores informed them that Paul’s soul was tainted by sin and unworthy of eternal bliss will haunt Dr. Flores’s dreams for the rest of her life. It’s the kind of horrific scene that every doctor dreads.
“As Mr. Carrol’s physician it was my terrible duty to inform his family that, due to Paul’s lifetime of impiety and occasional blasphemy, he would not be awaiting them in Heaven,” Dr. Flores said, looking physically and emotionally drained as she struggled to compartmentalize the traumatic experience of watching Paul’s 16-year-old daughter begin to sob when she learned that God had turned His back on her father and cast him out of his Heavenly Kingdom. “The worst part was Mr. Carrol’s youngest son is only eight, and he didn’t really understand what was happening. How do you tell an eight-year-old that his daddy gambled and masturbated too much to earn a spot in Paradise? It’s the kind of experience I’d never wish on any physician.”
This has to be the saddest story you’ll to read all month. If you’re not sitting in front of your computer weeping, you officially have no soul.
According to Dr. Flores, one of the most difficult parts of delivering the news was that she wasn’t able to tell Paul’s family definitively whether Paul’s soul was being held in Purgatory or had been cast into the Lake of Fire to face eternal damnation. “People sometimes think that doctors can do anything,” said Dr. Flores, “but the harsh truth is that there are limits to our medical knowledge—all I can tell the family for sure is that Mr. Carrol’s soul was banished from Heaven. I can’t give the family the much-needed closure of knowing their father is being tormented by Satan and his legion of demons as we speak. That’s just something that our current medical science does not allow us to know for certain, despite lots of highly funded research being done in this area.”
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: this story is a complete and total downer. All we can do is hope that Paul’s family is able to move on despite their grief, and that Dr. Flores can take comfort in the knowledge that she performed her job as a healthcare professional with courage and grace, even when she had such painful news to deliver. While knowing that their father wasn’t righteous enough for Heaven is surely a wound the Flores family will never fully get over, we can only hope that with time they’ll start to heal. Here’s hoping they’ll be reunited with their father again in Purgatory or Hell, depending on where God sent him!
