Notes from the Bedside: Tales of a Chaplain

"Morning Prayer": My typical '"setup" on any morning
(sans the iPod), experienced in a special way
at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur.

Back from another retreat at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur: a home away from home for about twelve years now. I do most of my writing here, often with a coffee cup at hand and a few books. There isn't much else to do. So aside from writing, I spend some of my time rummaging through the "old stuff" just to see what's there. In my latest rummaging I came across something I wrote last year, which I thought might be worth sharing.


Monday turned out to be a day of surprise hugs and unexpected connections. 

I went to visit Bella in the morning. I had seen her a few times before and she never showed much response. She was elderly, nonverbal, contracted; sometimes she responded to my voice by looking at me, sometimes not. On Monday, when I walked into her room, I expected much of the same. I stood by her right side and took her hand, which she began to squeeze quite hard. I wasn't sure if this was a meaningful response or just contractions. But after a few minutes she let go of my hand and reached her arm out to me as if to embrace me. So I leaned down to let her embrace me—and, oh, how she held me tight and patted my back. I just stayed there, laying my head against her shoulder with my other arm draped across her chest. I felt like a small child in its mother's arms. 

It seemed important to let her hold me like that—to allow her to offer and express something deep within her, something that still lived beneath what had become her "incapacities": dementia, stroke, perhaps Parkinson's . . . For me it was an authentic moment of ministry because it was an authentic moment of human connection—without words but with the most articulate language we have: the language of our bodies.

I left Bella feeling joy and amazement. I thought of how deprived she and so many sick people must be of touch, contact. I thought of how few people would let themselves be held by a sick woman unable to speak, unable to get out of bed. Not that I credit myself. It was a moment of pure grace.

Later that day I walked by David's room. He was a fifty-year-old man with metastatic pancreatic cancer who would soon go to a nursing home to spend his final days. His brother and uncle were with him and were signing paperwork for the transfer. David was pacing around the room, wanting desperately to be taken outside for a cigarette: his "last one before he dies." The doctor finally wrote the order for him to go outside, and I volunteered to accompany him (no one else wanted to) along with his brother and uncle down to the miserable, enclosed "smoking shack" around the corner from the ER. When David heard I would take him (a staff person had to accompany him), he threw his arms around me and hugged me for a long time saying thank you, thank you, thank you, as if I had granted him his greatest wish (which perhaps I had). So down we went in the wind and the cold and the rain, and I stood by him in that wretched shack, inhaling smoke, while he began to cry about all he would miss in this world and about how he had "ruined [his] life."

I suppose I had once again surrendered to what the moment called for—to what God might have been calling for (perhaps not the second-hand smoke part): to be with these two people in a way that others may have found impossible: unsanitary, disgusting, uncomfortable. That I could even do so was a sure sign of God's grace breaking into the most unexpected places.