Priest links grieving families, dying patients
“The main goal is bringing in the family that cannot see their loved ones and telling them, ‘We are in it together. You are not alone.’ ” The Rev. Gabriel Ghanoum
ATLANTIS, Fla. – The priest’s cellphone buzzed again.
An hour earlier that day, April 1, he had given last rites to yet another COVID-19 patient at JFK Medical Center. But now he was needed again.
So the Rev. Gabriel Ghanoum repeated his routine as a humble and technologically savvy hospital chaplain on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.
He slipped his freshly scrubbed hands inside surgical gloves. He pulled a hospital gown over his cleric’s collar. He shrouded his face with protective masks.
And as he walked into a room where the only sounds were the woosh and hum of a ventilator, he pulled out his smartphone. It was sealed inside a clear sandwich bag.
Pressing buttons through plastic, he dialed a woman in Austin, Texas, patched in her brother in Atlanta and put them on speakerphone.
With his left hand, he raised the phone above the face of Tom Craciun, 77, a champion swimmer now in the final moments of a battle with the deadly disease.
His gloved right hand holding Craciun’s, he recited the Sacrament of the Sick — Our Lord Jesus Christ who promised through the apostle James, is there anyone sick among you? ...
When he finished, he stood in silence. And the voices of grieving children and grandchildren, crying out of his phone from the seclusion of their homes, said final goodbyes.
Then the priest hung up. Alone now with a nurse and the patient, he sang through his face mask a spiritual hymn — I have decided to follow Jesus ... no turning back ... the world behind me, the cross before me . ... “I kept singing until his last breath.”
About an hour later, the priest’s phone would buzz again.
Father Gabriel, as Ghanoum has come to be known in his nine years as JFK’s hospital chaplain, has the name of an angel, and that’s exactly what he is to many relatives barred from the hospital by visitor policies.
“The most wonderful priest, like he came down from heaven,” Craciun’s daughter, Nancy Jean Pierce, would later say.
“Every experience is very humbling and very powerful,” he said, “because you come to know the legacies, the stories, of the dying, but also of the living. You become the spiritual and emotional archivist.”
It’s dangerous, too.
“The moment you have fear, then you cannot be near,” he said. “You have to have trust in what you are doing. The main goal is bringing in the family that cannot see their loved ones and telling them, ‘We are in it together. You are not alone.’ ”
Using his smartphone and apps like Zoom and FaceTime as clerical instruments, Ghanoum serves as the “emotional proxy” between the dying and their immediate family, who can virtually watch or listen as last rites are administered.
The coronavirus pandemic isn’t the first time he has faced death.
In 1985, Ghanoum was a 32-year-old bank executive based in Mexico City. One day in September, he returned home late from a business trip. At 6:30 a.m., after tossing and turning, he decided to head to his office about 30 minutes away.
As he approached downtown, he heard what sounded like a bomb exploding. An 8.0-magnitude earthquake lasted 13 seconds and killed more than 5,000 people.
After pulling survivors from the rubble, he learned that his own house had been destroyed. He wondered what might have happened to him if he had fallen asleep the night before.
The idea of the priesthood, which he had considered as a teenager, took hold. By 1993, he was ordained at St. Jude Catholic Church in Miami.
A couple of days before Craciun died, at Ghanoum’s suggestion, Craciun’s daughter and son, along with their own children, made audio recordings of their personal goodbyes to the dying man.
They texted the files to Ghanoum, who played the recordings on his phone. Craciun was barely conscious, but Ghanoum said he felt the dying man’s hand move as one of the grandchildren said goodbye. “I broke down,” he said. “I cried.”
One day, when the pandemic is gone, the Craciun children plan to invite Ghanoum for dinner at her dad’s South Palm Beach condo.
“This has been a blessing and a very humbling experience,” said Ghanoum.
“This story is not about me,” he said. “This is about ‘we’ – how you can do good and see good in others. I hope it can inspire other people to do good in the world.”