On Prayer

I know this is out of the blue, but something has been weighing on me for the last few days and I don't know how to find the rightness of the situation.

I learned earlier this week that an long ago friend of mine, we could even say an acquaintance of mine suffered a massive brain aneurysm. (And because he was an acquaintance, I have an easier time talking about this)

He is 31 years old.

Yesterday he was pronounced brain dead by his doctors.  So, at that point does one say "he was 31 years old" ?
If you are brain dead and your body is on life support, still pumping blood, your body is alive, yes. But your brain is not.  And so, are you dead or alive?  Your brain is not your soul, yet neither is your body. Where is his soul?  The functioning entity that makes the man human has ceased to function, but the human body continues on.

C.S. Lewis says : You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

In that case, I'd like to go ahead an believe that the man's soul has moved on it's way.

The facebook page of this friend is alive with prayers for healing and recollections of good times past, and words of sympathy to the family on the loss of their loved one.

It's such a mix, it seems no one knows whether to say the man is dead or that he is alive.  The people praying certainly believe he is not dead.  The people offering their sympathy clearly believe he is, but this could also be a case of bad information.  But heavens! Who gives that kind of information when they aren't certain?  "So and So died!"...."oh. well, wait....nope, nope he is not dead, he is alive!"

That one would raise some eyebrows, eh?
Either he was dead and has been raised from the dead or he was never dead in the first place.  I mean WOW. Either way.

The question becomes, eventually, what is the purpose of prayer in this situation?  Some people pray for healing. But, let's recount: the man is brain dead.  So prayers for healing would only be beneficial if they were prayers for complete healing. Like, the man wakes up, looks around the hospital room at all his family members & friends, and is all "heeey! Paart-aaay!"And he would.  He would say that.

Any healing that isn't considered a full recovery only keeps the man here, in a state of less ability (considerably less) than the was before.  And if you knew the man, he wouldn't want that.  Or at least, I wouldn't want that for him.
But these people who pray...they believe! They believe that God will heal the man. Fully, I would imagine.  They pray and they wait for the miracle.

But death. The death of Christian, isn't that a miracle too?  The be united in heaven with God and his Son and all of the heavenly hosts.  Isn't that the whole reason Christ died? So that the miracle of salvation upon death could be a reality?

Should we want that for our fellow Christians?  Death, so that they may be miraculously reunited with their Father in heaven.
I mean, I don't go around wishing death upon on my friends & family so they can be in heaven.  Their families and friends would miss them. They would suffer not only the loss of a person, but of a help mate or a daughter or a brother.

But at the death, the partial death, the loss of a soul (?), the loss of brain function, or of an ability to be anything but a vegetable, is Death then to be welcomed?

If it was my husband or my daughter or my mother or father or brother....certainly not.  I would not welcome death.  I would not rejoice in it. I would suffer.

But I'd like to think that eventually I would be able to look back on their death and be thankful that they are in heaven and not suffering on earth.

Which leaves a very big question, dealing with a full recovery.  Is it selfish to pray for a full recovery? If the man could re-enter life just as he had been living it, does he miss out (for a time) on the miracle of heaven?  His friends and family wouldn't miss out on his presence.

Obviously, prayers that God's will be done are the safest, per se.
But did God ever want us to be safe Christians?

I'm so confused.