Waking Up Surprised

I was leaving the YMCA yesterday and saw a houseless man with one leg in a wheelchair, the other having been amputated just below the knee. He was using his one leg on the ground to propel him forward and seemed to be used to getting around that way as he was not actively struggling with it or seemingly upset.

I’ve worked with so many patients who have gone through amputation surgeries and for whatever reason, this type of loss is one of the ones I am most drawn to support people in. I have been with houseless folks pre-surgery, showing me their black feet (when I say black feet, I mean BLACK feet…this was a new sort dead tissue for me to see before working at an inner city hospital) as a kind of anticipatory grief practice. I knew the next time I saw him, instead of his uncovered black feet, I would see two nubs covered in bandages. We imagined how his life would change, being discharged to the streets without feet. We joked about the difficulties of stealing from stores in a wheelchair when his practice had been to run. The wounds from these surgeries require high levels of hygiene, which is completely impossible in a tent.

I’ve had so many patients at the VA who had undergone these types of losses years earlier only to adapt and come back to us with other health issues. But sometimes the trauma of those losses remained unprocessed. It is a strange thing to lose part of your body.

I bring all of this up to say, there is a certain kind of disorientation that comes from waking up to a new/changed/different body. And though I am unbelievably lucky so far to have kept all my wanted body parts, every once in awhile, I wake up to my very different life and feel a sense of surprise. Surprise that I left my seventeen-year marriage, surprise that I am the only adult in my house, surprise that my house is full of pets, surprise that my life has fully de-centered men in every way. Of course, this feeling of surprise is often followed by a little thrill of excitement and pride.

It seems kind of shitty to even compare this type of total reorientation in life to something as major as losing a foot or a leg. Like, in some ways, saying this is just not cool at all. I’m guessing my houseless friend isn’t feeling thrill when he looks down at his new nubs and bandages. But I think all humans experience grief and disorientation. And the feelings themselves are often so similar even if the details are really different. Maybe he is thrilled to know that he will no longer have to see those black dead feet. I’m not really sure.

Perhaps having a beloved but dead body part excised in order to live a safer and healthier life is not unlike leaving a relationship that has since died* and feels like a weight one can no longer bear. That in leaving behind what is dead, new life is on the horizon. Even if it’s not the life that was imagined and sacrificed so highly to reach for. It’s an opportunity. A new future that is unwritten.

I was raised to believe that divorce is a bad thing. And certainly there is a lot of pain in divorce and it is a hugely destabilizing process for children and adults.

And. Would I tell my houseless friend that it was a bad thing to remove his blackened feet? No. I don’t think I would. There is a quiet dignity in burying our beloved dead body parts and relationships. It is intellectually honest. And it makes room for the spirit to breathe again, to stop the creep that dead tissue sometimes does, invading healthy tissue in a race to win it all.

In many ways, I’ve left behind the binary thinking of good and bad. I’m learning to be in my body, to awaken desire, to FEEL, really feel the full human experience. It is a wild thing to be alive.

*Please know that these comments are specific to my experience and a relational dynamic I was part of and participated in for two decades. This is not a reflection on the personhood of my former spouse.

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.

CPE - A Marathon of Unraveling

I had a friend ask recently how things were going for me at the hospital. For those of you who don’t know, I am almost done with a unite of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) that began right as everything shut down because of COVID-19. That means I started a full-time unpaid job at a hospital in the final weeks of my master’s program in the middle of a global pandemic. I’m weird. My kids’ first day home from school was my first day at work at the hospital. My graduate degree is done now (Yea!) and I’m closing in on my final weeks of CPE. It’s weird to think about what it will be like when all of this is done as the job I planned to return to for the summer at the Y probably won’t be up and running still. Eh, if anything COVID-19 has taught me is to just plan on today. I’ll think about that later.

Everyone I talked to before starting CPE who had done it themselves described it as “intense.”* I thought I was well-suited for the work because I’ve done a lot of personal work and therapy and have a disposition for connecting with strangers. Turns out, that’s all true. AND my work is ongoing. Like, some of it is just beginning. The difference between chaplaincy and other spiritual or counseling work is that the chaplain’s presence IS the intervention, which means the chaplain must connect to their own emotions and story in order to engage the person at their point of need (rather than meeting their needs). We do not provide guidance and information. We go into the valley where the patient is and engage the feelings of what that’s like. We do not escort people out of their valley nor do we skirt around the valleys we’d rather avoid. This means my story is regularly activated and I have to care for myself as I stay present with people in sometimes the hardest moments of their lives. I’ve seen some real shit, you guys. So. Many. Hard. Things. This means I cry at work. This means I’m sometimes triggered by interactions. There is no “fixing” things or experiences for others. I cannot and will not rob others of their work to do. It is their story. Our stories just cross paths for a moment. I am an enneagram 2 called to witness the human experience and not fix it. I’m called to engage the pain and tragedy of what it is to be a human being.

In this process, I have experienced a beautiful unraveling. I’m shedding narratives about myself that are no longer serving me and I’m realizing what I can and cannot do. It’s an experience in exploring my own spiritual authority and allowing my intuition to participate actively while keeping my personal curiosity in check. It’s an experience in examining all my relational and emotional patterns. It’s unblocking certain feelings and experiences I haven’t attended to or receiving feedback from my peers about things I don’t know about how I come across to others. It’s bringing myself to the table of engagement without making the moment about me. My story becomes in service to theirs. I’m discovering the types of encounters I really enjoy (post-partum moms with their babies) and the ones that require a shit ton of care after (turns out, code blues aren’t as sexy as I’d anticipated).

It’s coming into a patient’s life for just a moment in the hopes of providing transitional care and shoring up their support systems for their long-term work. In some ways, my scope of practice is small. Most patients I only see one time. But I like to think that just having someone hold space for your reality in the midst of a traumatic experience can help lessen the work leftover when the trauma has passed. It also means that my role can be as a conduit for someone to practice their faith the way they prefer, which can be totally different from the way I practice mine. So sometimes I get to be a part of someone connecting to their spiritual leader or to words and methods of prayer or meditation I’ve never experienced in my tradition or even my religion. It’s an incredible honor to be that link. I really love it when I get to do that. One time I got to stand in for a Catholic priest (visitation for them is limited to end of life circumstances) and rather than activating my semi-regularly present impostor’s syndrome, I felt ELATED by it. My Catholic grandparents were with me with my arm raised above my precious friend who requested a blessing.

I don’t know what’s next for me. I feel like I have so many emotional internet browser “tabs” open right now, so many things I need to work on within myself. And plenty of shifts to cover and Zoom meetings to attend. But in the midst of this tornado, I’m being reborn. I’m growing. I’m coming into my calling. I’m being integrated into a more mature, authoritative version of myself.

* In case you’re unfamiliar with the process, CPE is done in units of 12 weeks of work. If you’re lucky enough to get a residency (my long-term goal), you can do 4 units consecutively and get paid. I’ve almost completed an internship at Legacy Emanuel in Portland, which will give me one unit. I can’t do a ton with one unit, though many places hire someone with 2. CPE involves shift work, classes, supervision, reading/writing, group work, and mentoring. I’ve got mainly 12 hour overnight shifts where I’m the only chaplain there for an adult hospital, children’s hospital and the Oregon Burn Center. It’s over 550 beds. I go to all the codes, deaths, attend to requests for spiritual care, and round on all our trauma admits. I pray with people pre-surgery, assist patients and their families with naming feelings, sifting through their experience in the hospital and what brought them to us. I attend to families who have lost a family member. I help people fill out an Advance Directive (including things like a DNR). I’ve sat with a lot of people who were on the brink of death, including infants. I help people pick out funeral homes and figure out how to honor their dead in the midst of a pandemic. The work is varied. I never know what’s on the other side of that door. The 12 hour overnight shifts are covered by interns every night for the whole 12 weeks, so on the days we have class, one of us was always on the night before and one of us is always on the night after. It’s a fascinating experiment in what the human body and heart can handle.