Well you won't be getting a prayer from me but please accept my boundless good wishes for both of you.

When my dad was on his way out a few months ago in a coma in hospital, my atheistic sister and I (Dawkins acolyte that I confess to being) got the priest in to give him the last sacrament. The fellow was nervous to begin with but he warmed to his task and I even heard my sister giving out an inadvertent "amen" at one point, which drew a disdainful though discreet raised eyebrow from me. He invoked a whole litany of saints who he called on to pray for our dad. We thought his list would never end - he must have mentioned at least fifty or sixty and we were wilting fast. He spoke again and again to dad, even though we'd told him that his brain had already died. He turned to us abruptly and retorted that while that might be the case his soul was still in the room. That gave us a bit of a shiver, considering that we might have said one or two things over dad that he would certainly have disapproved of had he been conscious. After Father had finished, we told him that dad was a bit of a contrarian, with his own original views on who shot JFK, the moon landings and the Van Allen belts and global warming. Well that got the priest all indignant, for it turned out that he too was a climate change denier, and he gave us his big argument there and then. It was all very amusing and light-hearted, and we were glad we'd sent for him. I even gave him a tip. It was just what my dad would have wanted, though any tip from him would have been much smaller than mine. I hope his soul didn't disapprove.