Being a born-again atheist, I figured Eddie was the perfect test subject. But he stood frozen like a deer in the swirling headlamp of The Light.

Eddie was a devout smoker and thus an equally devout cancer patient. His prognosis was unavoidable and his last days limited. He spewed bravado as friends and family — all Baptist and all pious to the point of putridness — attempted to bring him back into their flock. Eddie was clearly the black-lunged sheep of the family.

Eddie’s mother sat with him for many hours, which was a horrible torture to inflict on a dying man. Wraith-like and armed with a heavy, black family Bible, she reminisced endlessly on Eddie’s childhood, managing to circle repeatedly back to his teenage baptism during a moment of puppy-lust-induced religious revelation. Yes, Eddie had once been born again, though he danced with the Devil more often than he prayed with the Saints.

His friend Derek had, as the Southern Baptists love to shout, “Come to Jesus” in years following his and Eddie’s nights of delightful debauchery. Derek was keenly aware that Eddie was a non-believer and had turned his back on God, Jesus and salvation in an immoral trifecta. He begged Eddie to give what little remained of his life to The Lord, to trust that God did indeed exist and had some undefined scheme in mind for Eddie’s soul.

Eddie refused, politely and loudly. Yet Eddie was anything but certain.

In the small hours Eddie would awaken from chemically induced naps and bitch to nobody in particular about death. Death scared the piss out of him and he wasn’t afraid to say so when alone. Well, not completely alone.

I was there listening to his frightened ramblings and watching him thumb through the family Bible his mother left behind, no doubt looking for loopholes. I was there on an otherwise quiet Friday afternoon when a panicked expression exploded across his gin-blossom face, dislodging a contraband cigarette. His heart began to wildly rebel against his broken metabolic system and his life faded into nothingness.

If Eddie was confused in life, death had him completely bewildered. Torn between the extremes of absolute atheism and his God-fearing clan, our middle ground of ghosts was perplexing. Eddie stood in his split-tail gown at the foot of his hospital bed and stared blankly at himself.