Maybe this is the most obvious thing I’ve ever written, but hospice is sad, y’all. I’ve started working in hospice as a chaplain. It is so cool to learn a new context for my skills and to build a more well-rounded skillset with every job I take. I thought I was pretty well prepared to spend so much time with death. Having done my internship and residency in a level one trauma center during Covid, getting a divorce after a 17 year marriage, and then doing a fellowship in palliative care at the VA (often a precursor to hospice), I kind of thought I was pretty comfortable around death. Turns out, I am. I have come to see death as a friend. I have totally upended my life in light of my experiences around death these last four years in chaplaincy. So much of the life that I am building now is in light of the fact that all of us are temporary.
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Selfie on my first 12 hour night shift.
To Be a Witness
A huge part of chaplaincy work is witnessing people in the midst of the hardest moments of their lives. It is one of the most interesting, devastating, and humbling parts of the job for me. It also means that the illusion of safety and fairness that most adults live in so as to carry on in the world is largely refuted every time I come to work. I tend to take risks under the premise of “what are the odds that x, y, and z will actually occur?” Well, in the hospital setting, I am regularly confronted with the exception to those odds. I’m spending time witnessing a mother whose baby did drown in the bathtub or the spouse whose husband did commit suicide. It’s harder to maintain my self-imposed delusions that I live in a world where I can control the outcomes of circumstances related to the people and things I care about most. It is its own form of unraveling.
I am regularly overwhelmed by the tragedy of the human experience. I know my lens right now is specific to hospital work in a pandemic, but some really shitty things happen in the world. It can be so horrific to play my part as witness. There is no way to be a witness and remain disengaged, nor should I remove myself emotionally even if I could. The purpose of the witness is to hold space, document, reflect, and create a sense of solidarity in the horror of what is happening. And while the patient or the patient’s family is in fact living their own story and I am living mine, the intersection of my story with the stories of the suffering day in and day out creates a level of vulnerability and fatigue that has changed me in a real way. Not in a traumatic way or in a way that I think I would regret, but there is a way of navigating the world without really knowing and seeing the depth of what is possible in a moment of freak miscalculation or accident. I will never go back to that space of not knowing. And while that means I am operating without as many protective illusions about life and safety and fairness, it also means that I am holding gratitude and deep appreciation for what is. What I have, what I may lose, who I come home at the end of the day. As cheesy as it sounds, all I have is now. And I am infinitely blessed.
I’m still working out my theology of suffering. I know that the “everything happens for a reason” and “God’s plan includes this” kinds of frameworks do not work for me. I personally cannot navigate a world of suffering with the idea that God approves it all or that suffering is okay. I absolutely cannot. I do believe in a God of redemption and restoration. I believe in a God who does care for humanity collectively and personally. But shit happens and it happens lethally and unfairly. That is a hard thing to witness every single day. There is so much in this hospital system and in the realities of life that are not mine to hold or fix. But this much I know. I can be a witness and I personally can only do it through faith.