“Hearing the Story”

         He didn’t want a hospice chaplain when I first came to work. He had a church home, his own pastor; and I’m not sure he connected very well with the last chaplain he met. Still, it was my job to make an initial contact, to ask the question again, “would you like a visit from the Spiritual Care Coordinator,” and surprisingly, reluctantly, his wife reported that he said, "yes, okay, come"; and I began visiting soon after.

         “So, what’s it like to be the son of a war hero?” was the question I asked when he told me about his father. He tilted his head to study me, to consider the question never asked, to think about how he wanted to answer. And then he began, slowly, methodically, thoughtfully, explaining how it was to be eight years old, the oldest of three sons, his mother’s confidante, how it was to hear the news that his father’s battalion was captured in the Second World War, and how it was to pretend all the rest of the years of his life that he was fine.

         Weeks later, he said to me after I asked another hard question, “I would never have had this conversation a year ago. I would never have spoken of such things.”

         What is it about having lost everything that can make a heart bloom? What is it about the prospect of death, a near death experience that can break a person wide open?

         Everybody has a story to tell. Of pain and loss, of triumph and trouble, of love and failures and courage, everybody has a story. It’s just that most people never tell it. They never even see it as a story. They never even think of how to talk of it until maybe they realize that their story is almost over. And they get asked a question that in all the years before they would have joked about or dismissed or glossed over. Only now they give it consideration.

         When I worked with hospice, I would sometimes find myself hating all the death and dying. Sometimes I got so angry that I would have to say goodbye one more time and way too soon. And it would happen and I would think, that’s it, I’m done. No more hospice. And then there would come a moment after an hour of easy talk of the unkind heat and the plight of the Constitution and a book my patient and I both loved; and what would seem like out of nowhere, someone would tell me what it is really like to live in the shadow of a heroic priestly father, what it feels like to hit the baseball right in the middle of the sweet spot, to stand in a courtroom and face a jury knowing that you are on the side of righteousness, and suddenly I would feel more alive than I have ever felt; and as the tears gathered and the chill bumps rose, I would whisper my most sincere prayer of gratitude for this deep and holy moment of human connection, of being the one who gets to hear a life's story. And all I could say was thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

You are the light of the world.

Yours,

Lynne