I guess I’m starting a list of weird things about being a chaplain:
People perceive you as a representative of God.
You never know what your day is going to feature, apart from a significant number of humans with an extraordinary depth of need.*
Today, for example, I thought I was going to help a dying patient write a good-bye letter to his teenaged daughter. He was hoping she would receive it and be inspired to visit him one last time. This morning, when I looked to see which room he’d been transferred to, I learned he had been discharged to hospice yesterday.
He had said the first day we met that he might have three days to three months to live. That was two days ago. So that means that today, by a doctor’s estimation at least, he has between 1 day and three months minus two days to live. His days are literally numbered.
I choked up when I saw he’d been transferred. I felt sad I didn’t get to work on the letter with him like we’d planned. Imagine, a daughter that’s wished her entire life to hear how her alcoholic dad actually feels about her helping a dying alcoholic to tell his daughter how he actually feels about her.
Though we didn’t get to write the letter, I realized on my way home how clarifying it was to imagine the situation through that dad’s eyes, and to realize how much I don’t know about him.
It was the second time I’ve encountered an estranged dad-daughter dynamic recently. Both times involved substance abuse. The first encounter, I didn’t have the foggiest idea who was on the other side of the door. The nurse overheard I was the chaplain and said, “I was just about to place a consult.” I asked her which room, and off I went.
The guy was upright and looked strong. Kind of handsome, even, except that he had no teeth, because hospitals—for reasons I still haven’t discerned—remove people’s dentures. The man had two daughters, one of whom won’t speak him, which was one of the first things he told me.
He’d spent his life logging in remote regions of Alaska. Logging…and drinking. “And maybe a little coke.” (Let’s face it—probably a lot of coke.) Then he told me he’d been “more scared of those little girls at home than I was goin’ off to work for months at a time.”
This was the first time I realized my dad might also have been scared. Maybe he didn’t want to fuck me up the way his dad did him. Maybe he didn’t know how to be different than his own dad. Maybe he just didn’t know how to be the kind of dad he wanted to be.
Yesterday I went to see a 95-year-old man. I anticipated he would be unconscious since he was 95 and on comfort care, which is essentially acute hospice.
Nope! Actually, for about half of the visit I thought I had gone to the wrong room, because I would have estimated the patient I was sitting with was in his 60’s. It was only as I noticed his skin that I could see the signs of real age. And when he told me about being interned in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. (He spent five years imprisoned by his adopted country, completely innocent of any wrongdoing. He wasn’t even Japanese. Can you imagine?)
After the war, the man had lived a cosmopolitan life—he’d married and had three children. He spoke 8 languages. He told me without a hint of self-consciousness, or self-awareness, that one reason he lived so long is that he had always had maids (except the internment part, I guess).
Now he’s approaching death with a quiet shrug and half smile. He said he’s ready. I wondered aloud, “How do you say goodbye to your children, knowing it’s the end?” He said it wasn’t that hard. That they were well into adulthood. Their lives had all gone well. They weren’t living with regret or resentment—at least he wasn’t—and there’s a lot of peace in that.
His phone rang twice while I was sitting there. The first time he pointed a finger and told it to stop ringing. The second time, he flipped it open and answered in a voice that still sounded like a young man. It was his urologist, who he promptly, graciously laid off, explaining his services would no longer be needed. Because the man is going to die soon. The lawyer is coming on Sunday morning to finalize the estate.
I met another late-in-life-and-happy-to-be-dying patient this week. A nonagenarian great-grandmother who was watching The Price of Right, which I told her I was more than happy to watch with her, so that’s what we did for the first ten minutes of our visit, both of us murmuring at the TV and to each other as they rotated through contestants and games.
Shortly after we muted the gameshow the woman mentioned that her son predeceased her six years ago. I said, “Well, wherever you’re going, I imagine it’s precisely where he is.” She looked at me with a serene smile and nodded slowly, as if to say, “Yes, my child. Now you know why I’m smiling.”
Maybe in addition to making a list of weird things about being a chaplain, I should also make a list of things I love about it. Never knowing what to expect qualifies as both. Another thing I love? Work that gives more than it takes.
*Any and all identifying information is changed to protect patients’ confidentiality.
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