For the past week, my wife & I have made a daily pilgrimage from her cousin's home in Long Island to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, where her brother Howie is recovering from a serious heart attack. We board the Long Island Railroad after rush hour each morning & ride the 45 minutes to Penn Station. Even during non-rush hours, we emerge from the train into a massive throng of humanity in constant motion. We walk the approximately 12 blocks from there to Bellevue, & on our way, we pass this church. Founded in 1736, Bellevue is the oldest public hospital in the U.S. & was where many of the victims & survivors of 9/11 were treated. It is a mammoth facility. Each morning, we stop at the front desk to get guest passes, take a very long walk through a labyrinth of corridors, ride an elevator to the 10th floor Critical Care Unit & spend several hours at Howie's bedside. He is attached to many tubes, which deliver various substances that keep him alive. The tubes are connected to complex-looking electronic devices with lcd readouts which periodically flash & beep. For the first several days we are there, he is being kept unconscious via sedation. His breathing is being sustained by machines. We hold his hand & talk to him. We remind him of better times we've shared & tell him funny stories, hoping that somehow our positivity & good humor are penetrating through to him & helping to sustain him, though we have no real way to know. Finally, the doctors feel it is safe to very gradually reduce the level of sedation. His eyes flicker open occasionally & eventually he starts to recognize us. Several more days pass, with only minimal signs of improvement. After several abortive, failed attempts on the part of the doctors to remove the breathing tubes, he pulls them off himself & starts to breathe on his own. It is now a few days later & two weeks since his heart attack, & he is well enough to be transferred out of the Critical Care Unit to another wing of the hospital. He will have a difficult period of rehabilitation, but we are joyful that he has survived this ordeal & that at this point there seems to be no signs of neurological damage. What does his story have to do with this church? I'm not sure. I'm still an atheist who believes he's alive thanks to extreme medical intervention, though my wife is more of an agnostic & seems inclined to believe that the large number of people praying for his recovery may have had an influence of some kind. A few last bits of trivia about this: Two police detectives (one active & one retired) who knew Howie & happened to be in the bar when he collapsed, immediately started CPR on him. Another employee at the bar ran across the street to the fire station & returned with a fireman (who also knew Howie) who brought de-fibrillating equipment with him, with which he was able to resuscitate him. It's a little unclear whether he stopped breathing for a minute & a half or four minutes, but he was technically dead for a short while & would no doubt have not survived without immediate, expert, life-saving attention. We stopped at the bar one evening & the two detectives happened to walk in while we were there, so we were able to thank them for saving Howie's life. The retired detective is Steve Di Schiavi, who happens to be starring in a new series called The Dead Files, which will premiere on the Travel Channel on Sept 23rd. In this series, he travels around the country investigating hauntings & other paranormal phenomena each week. More info at: http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/The_Dead_Files/About_The_Show/The_Dead_Files Steve Di Schiavi is of Italian descent, the other detective is Irish-American & the fireman (who we also met & thanked) is African-American. At the hospital, my wife saw a Muslim cleric praying for another patient & asked him to say a prayer for her brother (which he did). Howie is Jewish. Where else but in New York City could this happen?