How am I coping? Funny you should ask.

During my internship for chaplaincy, what is referred to as Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), I served primarily palliative care patients. My patients were all over the hospital–the cancer building, the trauma ICU, the pulmonary unit, the cardiac floor, and the second floor, which was a catch-all for maladies usually related to poor access to healthcare. 

I wore out my ballet flats walking up and down stairs and across breezeways trying to find a moment with a patient when they were lucid, unoccupied, and receptive to a chaplain visit. Sometimes those moments found me. 

I remember walking into a room of a new-to-me patient having barely glanced at her chart, and after I introduced myself and my role, she said, “My name is Amy.¹ I’m 29 years old, I’m dying, and I don’t know how to tell my son.”

It took my breath away. 

During our visits, I held her hand. I rubbed her back while she vomited. I listened to her stories. I asked the doctor to explain to me why she was dying. 

The doctor explained all the complicated medical reasons to me with gentleness and patience, but she didn’t give me the answers I was really looking for:

Why is she suffering?

Why does a child have to lose his mother?

Why has healthcare failed her?

How do you keep attending to these patients who almost always die?

Another time, I ran into the child life specialist in the hallway as I was talking to a patient’s husband. She pulled me aside and asked me to stop in the room down the hall when I had a minute. 

Like a fool, I asked no follow-up questions and strode confidently into the room where I encountered a woman weeping over her husband as he moaned in pain. She rubbed his arms and legs and said over and over again, “He has to stay alive until the girls get here!”

I took a good look at the man laying in the bed. He was tall and ruggedly handsome. He looked like he climbed mountains before he fell ill and was around the age of my own dad. He spoke soft, comforting words to his wife and then said, “My two daughters have been at summer camp all week and they’re on their way here. They’re still 9 hours away. I just have to make it until then.”

I walked over to the window sill where framed pictures of his family had been set up. His daughters were beautiful. In the pictures, they had long, blond hair and big grins on their faces as they hugged their dad. Blissfully unaware of what today would bring.

He moaned and complained of pain as his wife wiped her tears. I’m sure my face gave away how utterly unprepared for the moment I was, but the man beckoned me over to the bed and asked if I would lead him in the “Our Father.” I replied that I wasn’t Catholic (Why? It didn’t matter! I knew the prayer! I was so scared!). 

In an almost fatherly way, he said, “It doesn’t matter, chaplain. Just say a prayer for me from the heart.” 

So I took his hand and prayed for the warmth of God to surround him, to which he muttered, “I feel it, God.”

I don’t remember how I exited the room. I imagined I stumbled out of there, clutching my throat, but I’m sure I just walked out. 

His daughters made it in time to say goodbye before he died that night. I’ll never forget how the room overflowed with family the next day. 

I hope I look less shocked these days when I enter rooms. 

Working at a pediatric hospital is somehow easier and harder than working at an adult hospital. 

It’s harder because kids are so very vulnerable, subject to all sorts of cruelties and indignities in the world. And yet a video game or a gob of slime is magic that doesn’t seem to work on adults.. 

I used to think Cocomelon was some hypnotic governmental tool when I was subjected to hours of it for the sake of my own toddler. Now I see that hypnosis can sometimes be a miracle. It’s the perfect pairing with morphine on tap. 

I am also surprised at how a little goes a long way for my own well-being. 

This work is very, very hard. We have to erect our own boundaries to protect our ever-porous emotional landscape, and even then, even the most seasoned among us, lay awake at night thinking of a child’s grimace, a parent’s plea, a nurse’s crouch. 

So I stop at the gift shop on my way down from the floor and get some Sour Patch Kids. I chew gum. Constantly.

I drink ice cold water. 

I limit my coffee consumption to just three cups a day (just three, Ashley. BE STRONG.).

I cry in a colleague’s office. I lay on the floor with our facility dog. 

I climb six flights of stairs. I take a lap around the building. 

I read fantasy romance novels. Faeries! Monsters! Dragons! Oh my!

I eat Flaming Hot Cheetos until my fingers are red. I drive home in silence. 

I journal when my office mate is on her floor.

I go to therapy. A lot.

I kiss my Lexapro before I pop it into my mouth.

Occasionally, I pray. 

You would think prayer would be a chaplain’s go-to self-care method. 

But I’ve seen a lot of prayers go unanswered. I’ve seen scripture posted on the walls that did not seem to apply to my patients.

I’ve heard parents mutter “God has a plan” like a comma after each body-wracking sob. 

J.S. Park talks about this disillusionment that hospital chaplains can feel. He writes, “It’s probably easier to roll off my tongue that ‘I lost my faith,’ but it was more like, ‘My trust in this Person was broken.’”²

Listen, I didn’t need to see others suffering to question my faith. I went to seminary. I grew up with Capital T trauma from church. I watched the remnants of easily accessible pocket theology wash away with my miscarriages. 

I wasn’t surprised that watching children not only die, but also suffer, would push directly on the God wound. 

However, I was surprised that that push was more like applying pressure on a gash rather than deepening the cut.

There is a rupture, you see, when children die. It is the wrong order of things. 

But it happens. It has happened every generation. 

And yet we carry the wrongness of it with us in every generation, too. It’s not something that seems to get erased as time goes on. 

I am moved by the faith of a Muslim family who kneels in prayer five times a day as their child undergoes chemotherapy and radiation. 

I look on reverently as a Hindu family brushes their child’s forehead with paint, patiently explaining to me where the paint came from and what it is for. 

I lead the local priest into a patient’s room for the requested Anointing of the Sick, cringing at the language and at the same time bowing my own heart in prayer, hoping with them. 

I ask the priest as I walk him out of the building, “Do you really believe all of that?” I am secretly asking myself.

I write blessings for our staff and run up against the impossibility of this work. How do we honor the kids who die and not also feel that the work we do is futile? 

When my patients are intubated, when their wakefulness wanes, I think to bring prayers to their bedside to read to them. But more often than not, I’m putting the prayer books back on the shelf and reaching for poetry. For nature essays. I think about bringing them something beautiful to hear.

Remember the birds? I want to ask them. Can you smell the grass? Can you feel the heaviness of the air before it rains? Think, dear one, I want to say. Remember what the stars look like? 

Remember how it feels to be embraced by your mother? Remember how your whole body shakes with laughter when your sister tells a story? Imagine you’re on a beach and the sun is warming your body. Imagine that the hospital bed you are laying on is a hammock in the woods and the beeping of the machines is birdsong.

I’m realizing beauty is a form of prayer. 

Reading poetry, conjuring images of the earth, of love, of belonging–those are all a reaching for hope, for grounding, for peace.

Which is what prayer really is anyway, isn’t it? 

So how am I coping, you ask? 

I guess I’m learning how to pray.

1. Name changed to protect privacy.

2. From his most recent book, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve. It’s so good.