By John Simon
Being a chaplain is weird.
Nurses, health aides, administrators—all of them have this tangible kind of training. It not only gives them certain skills, it also draws a clear line between those who are and those who ain’t.
I’ve messed around with a first aid kit before. I know my way around some gauze. But I can’t do nursing stuff. If I did, I’d get fired. Like, immediately. I wash myself all the time. I’d like to say I’m pretty good at it. But can I change my ninety-year-old Alzheimer’s patient’s briefs? Absolutely not. Straight to jail.
But chaplaincy is different. We deal with intangibles. The emotional, dare I say, spiritual, side of things. We’re the listening ears, the empathetic head nods, the shoulders to cry on. That’s not exactly a specialized field.
I’ve seen some chaplains get upset when other members of the care team step on our emotional turf, trying to console and mend and sympathize with our patients.
I don’t. At least, I don’t think I do. Because we’re human, and if we force every medical worker to leave the emotional/spiritual stuff to the “real professionals” then pretty soon we’ll be programming robots to manage meds and take blood pressure. Empathy is a good thing. Being human to a human is a good thing.
But sometimes it sucks. I remember one time in particular. I had just arrived at the office, and the wife of one of our patients said that her husband had died that night. Hospice or not, it was still a shock. He had been talking and walking around just the day before. He was still sick, but he didn’t seem that sick. Then, in the middle of the night, he got up out of bed, fell over, and died. It was the first morning of many that his wife would wake up with no one beside her.
Our nurse had gone over to officially pronounce him. The funeral home had been contacted, but they wouldn’t be able to arrive to “take care of the body” for another ninety minutes or so. The office asked if I could stay with her until they arrived. So I headed over.
I’m not clinical enough to say if this woman was in shock or not. But at the very least she seemed shocked. It was as if she didn’t quite believe that the world around her existed. As if she was convinced that she was dreaming, feet barely touching the floor, unable to jolt herself awake. I remember the expression on her face, like a half squint. The face you make when you walk into a room and realize you’ve forgotten what you came to do.
Our nurse became this woman’s personal cheerleader. Every platitude you could imagine, just bouncing from her lips to closed ears, to the ceramic tile floor.
“He’s in a better place now.”
“God must have needed him for something special.”
Everything that I consciously try to remove from my personal vocabulary was ricocheting through that house.
I couldn’t pretend to be confident during this visit. Surprising as this sounds, I hadn’t seen my fair share of bodies yet at this point in my career. Chaplains show up in the eleventh hour, but rarely after the clock strikes midnight. That’s when i’s get dotted and t’s crossed. Paperwork gets started. Phone calls made.
So it was strange. But it was okay. I stayed quiet, spoke softly and minimally. Prayed when she asked me to pray. Asked easy, noninvasive questions. Echoed the nudges from our nurse to “remember to eat,” “call your son if you want to, we’re just here if you need us.”
I remember when we left: As she led us to her front door, she paused and turned to us.
“It’s just so strange. All of a sudden the house seems so…”
“Peaceful?” my nurse friend asked.
“No,” she said. “Empty.”
Empty.
My nurse friend did a good job; I’m not trying to throw old tomatoes. She’s a very sweet nurse who was trying to be humane to a fellow human. She was bold and comforting and warm, and that’s great. And that means something. It means something to try. It does. Even if your trying kind of sucks.
But we can’t paint silver linings over someone else’s cloudy day. While it’s meant to be helpful, sometimes it communicates that we’re uncomfortable with their sadness, and we’re trying to fix it for them. But that doesn’t work.
Sometimes the house is just empty.
And if you slow down enough, you can feel it too.