Hospital Notes #6

Today is my last day working at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware.

It has been a rich time in many ways: a time for recovery from a devastating loss; a time of rediscovery of a passion for pastoral care which had lain dormant for a decade; a time of renewal of my Spanish skills which are nicely polished at this point if I do say so myself; and a time for reevaluation of my vocation and what it means to follow Jesus with the gifts I have been given and in the place I have been put.

But it has also been a rather lonely time. The work of a chaplain is rather monkish. I have often plodded through the days, ever in need of fresh ways to keep pushing forward into the next encounter, and always emersed deeply into the very heart of things by the awesome power of the stories shared with me. I was not regularly comfortable just chatting. There is no harmony between jokes and death, even if many try with their gallows humor. I enjoyed the forced depth of my days, however. I do not seek sympathy for the loneliness I relate.

After two years of working here I have come up with a solid response to the “I-don’t-know-how-you-do-its” and the “that-must-be-so-hards” I receive. What’s the hardest part about the work? It might not be what you expect. It is not children dying. For me, it is the awkwardness of constantly offering myself to people who might or might not want to talk to me.

I come into a room ready to offer my full attention, all my heart– it is my craft to cultivate not only a disarming persona, but an unguarded self, as open as possible to another. Professional journals will warn you with just admonitions of appropriate boundaries. These I heed, but perhaps with a difference. I bound myself most of all in time. The ephemerality of my encounters allows me to give my all (as in all of me) because I know that the relationship will end. Occasionally my pastoral relationship with a family lasts for months; for medically complex patients who often return for inpatient stays they could last for years, if only episodically; but the majority of my time by far has been spent with people I will never see again, and only meet once. So, I have had to learn how to throw myself like a soft pear against countless brick walls, scoop up the mush that drips to the ground and brush the goo that clings to the mortar into my cupped hand. I must ever reshape myself into something roughly pear-shaped, something roughly me-shaped and knock on the next door.

Keep in mind that although I work here and have been in every single room many times, each time I meet someone new I am walking into someone’s bedroom. For now, they live here, and, for now, they are sick. Sick rooms are incredibly intimate, right? There is evidence of things we like to keep hidden out in plain sight so as to be close at hand. There are balled up tissues from distraught moms and dads. There are bodily fluids and devices that literally show what is happening on the inside of a person. And then there is the body itself, a child — a child at their most vulnerable — absolutely pathetic.

And here I am, cheerful, but not saccharine, approachable but not clingy, open but not invasive, disarming but not irreverent; doing my best to draw you out and make my concern apparent; actively trying to be different in a way that allows you to trust me, but also ready to leave if now is not the right moment, probably too ready most of the time.

That moment of presentation is not informational, I am not a brochure for pastoral care services, except when I am, and that feels icky. I am offering you myself, take it or leave it. I am presenting my personhood; with a particular set of skills which I believe to be universally helpful in times of stress: a nonjudgmental and confidential ear, a steady habit of self-observation which lets me let you be you in a special way, a setting aside of my own needs as much as possible in order to let the emotional energy of the moment be entirely one-sided, a friend who is a stranger so you don’t have to worry about what he’ll say to so-and-so later, a person to whom all your stories are new, so you can say them in a new way, or say them for the first time, or see them in a new light.

So many people have told me, “I have never told anyone that before.” What a severe honor.

I am an opportunity for comfort and maybe even transformation. Or not. The fruit of that struggle rehashed innumerably has grown me greatly. It is the hardest part of being a chaplain, and, in many ways, any person who would seek to love their neighbors. And so, I am grateful for the challenge, and will miss this particular form of doing it, particularly with the mostly Central American migrants with whom I got to do it.

So long, Nemours. Thank you, sincerely.