Hospital Chaplain

When I was a hospital chaplain, I had an uncomfortable familiarity with death. I say uncomfortable because I was 35 years old and far from that significant threshold for myself. I say familiarity because I officiated at more than 60 funerals during those years and I sat by the bedside of many people who were about to die. I responded to the nurses who called every time an infant died. I don’t think any of us ever get comfortable with that. I sat at the bedside of many people who were facing their own deaths. Some of them talked about everything but death. However I distinctly remember some, who on the doorstep to eternity, could speak openly about what they thought and how they felt.

Take for example Rosemary, who was in the hospital for many weeks. She was battling cancer and always appreciated a visit from the chaplain. In my first visit at her bedside she said to me ‘I’m going to die soon.’ As matter-of-factly as if she had said I’m going to have my hair done tomorrow. I admired that kind of confidence, and I spent some time every day for three weeks with her. Rosemary had an easy laugh and liked telling funny stories. She had some worries about how her family would react to her death. But she herself wasn’t worried. I admired her tremendously and tried to carry her confidence with me.

I spent some time visiting the woman with emphysema. This was in the days when a patient could still smoke in the hospital. So wouldn’t you know it -there she was smoking a cigarette. The skin on her face was dry and leathery; she could only speak a few words before coughing. She said to me, “thank you for dropping by Rev. ‘cough cough’ no need for you to stay ‘cough cough’ I’m way past redemption ‘cough cough’.”

A 60-year-old woman was brought into the emergency room bleeding from her femoral artery as the result of an auto accident. She was able to instruct her doctors that she didn’t want any blood transfusions. She was a Jehovah's Witness, and her religion prohibited the use of blood products. This drove the hospital staff crazy. In their eyes it would have been so easy to save this woman’s life. But to refuse blood products seemed to them like sure suicide. I explained to her doctors that she had the right to refuse medical procedures, even when her rationale didn’t make sense to them. They kept her alive longer using a hyperbaric chamber and oxygenating what blood she had left. Eventually she died. Her family was relieved knowing that without blood transfusions she could go straight to heaven. Her doctors were flummoxed.

Throughout those years I considered my parishioners to be the hospital staff. Nurses who were on their feet all day and all night; respiratory therapists who went from lung to lung extending the breath of life where they could; social workers and discharge planners trying to find adequate arrangements for the discharge of very sick people. They were a dedicated and hard-working group, and I was privileged to be held in their loving embrace.