Stay with Me, I Want to Be Alone: A Chaplain's Search for Meaning

After thousands of hours at the bedside and thousands of hours in education with my students, one thing I’ve come to understand is that of all the contagious things in a hospital—measles and tuberculosis and Covid-19—nothing is easier to catch than anxiety. It spreads faster than you can say, “I’m nervous.” And almost always, the most anxious person in the room is the last to be aware of it, even after they’ve infected everyone around them.

Chapter 1

Sometime before 6:45 a.m., Monday, August 22, 2022

“The man is dead,” the nurse says.

She’s standing next to me as we peer into the ICU room from the hallway. Next to the patient is a short, slim woman with long brown hair. She’s wearing flip-flops and faded blue jeans cuffed high up on her shin, as if she’s getting ready to wade into deep water.

“Who’s she?” I ask.

“I don’t know. She’s been here all day.” “Does he have any family?”

“There’s a daughter listed in the chart, but I don’t think anyone’s reached out to her.”

“So the daughter might not even know he’s dying?” “Dead,” the nurse says. “He’s dead.”

“Right. Right.” We pause in an eternity of awkwardness. “So. I wonder who that woman is,” says the nurse.

“I’ll go in and find out.” But for a moment longer, I just keep watching. Emergencies happen all day and night in the hospital, but death is never one of them.

And I feel lost. My brain is foggy. What’s the procedure again?

The woman in the room is now crying into her hands. I wonder if she’s the dead man’s significant other, though she looks at least fifteen years younger than him. She might be imagining a shared life suddenly altered: a conversation about what to make for dinner forever unfinished, the deafening quiet of a half-empty house.

I walk in slowly, on tip-toe. I speak to her in a loud whisper. “Hi.

I’m Keith, the chaplain here tonight.”

The woman turns to me and wipes her cheek. “Oh, hey,” she says softly. “I’m Tasha. I don’t know where I’m going to sleep tonight.”

That’s a new one. I draw back and cross my arms. “Wait. Is that why you’re crying?”

“Yes. Don’t judge me.”

“I don’t even know you.” I recoil even further from her.

A man enters the room. “Frank,” the woman says and dodges around me to embrace him.

“Is he…?” Frank stares at the dead man over the woman’s head. “He’s gone.” The woman’s face is pressed into his chest, muffling her

voice.

“Oh, Jesus, God, no!” Frank howls. “No, no, no! This cannot be real … This isn’t really happening … What’s happening isn’t real ….”

I’m starting to think he’s right. Or maybe I just hope he is. Everything about this visit feels off. Why did I talk to Tasha like that? What is wrong with me?

Shit—“off ” is not a feeling. What am I feeling?

Frank’s face reddens as the two of them squeeze each other more tightly. Tasha’s hands travel lower on his back. Then she’s murmuring things to him I can’t hear. I don’t want to hear them.

Unfortunately, one breaks through: “Maybe I could stay at your place tonight ….”

Frank asks, quiet and uneasy now, “Do his kids know he’s here?”

Tasha pulls back and stares into his chest, now splotched with her tears. “They’re my kids, too.”

“No, they ain’t. And they hate you. Did you call them?”

“I put in five years with this man. And you know what? Now they’re just gonna take what’s rightfully mine.”

“Tasha, that’s just—” Frank notices me. “Who are you?” I clench a smile. “Chaplain.”

“He ain’t religious.” Frank’s tone wavers uncertainly between anger and apology.

I nod. “Well. I’m not here for him. And he’s dead,” I add unnecessarily.

A woman and a man in their twenties barge in, closely tailed by a young attending physician who was perhaps hoping to head them off. “What the hell are you doing here, Uncle Frank?” the woman says.

Then she sees Tasha. “And you,” she snarls, “get out of here, now.”

“I have every right to be here. I’ve been with him for five years. And his stuff is rightfully mine,” Tasha says and lifts her pointy chin.

There is a charged moment as her implication zings around the room of the dead man. Then Tasha and the daughter lunge at each other. No fewer than two fistfuls of chestnut and golden hair have been gouged out at the root when a sudden motion in the one part of the room where all should be still makes the daughter scream.

The dead man rises in his bed. He opens his dry lips, but all that comes out is a sickening mechanical vibration. Everyone freezes and stares at him in horror …

… and I feel a vibration close to my ear. I look through the glass to- wards the nurse in the hall, but her face is distorting, dissolving ….

I open my eyes. My phone alarm is vibrating near my pillow.

It’s 6:45 a.m.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a night person. I sigh and close my eyes again. Then I lie in bed for a while, getting down on my- self for not having more internal motivation. I’ve learned to love being up early in the morning. But I still hate getting up early in the morning.

The other side of the bed is empty. Typically, my wife Shuang wakes up our son and gets him dressed before I take over with him.

I roll out of bed and stretch. I take a deep breath, realizing I have my on-call shift today. Once I get to the hospital this morning, I’ll be there for twenty-four hours.

I make breakfast, grinding coffee beans and heating the water— I enjoy the flavor of a pour-over coffee better than drip. This is an intentionally spiritual time for me. I read something inspiring and thought-provoking while I drink. It’s the quiet before the storm of my three-year-old.

This morning, it’s Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings:

The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only the one who listens can speak.

I consider the words for a while, thinking about how they might ap- ply to whatever I run into today. One word leads to another. Soon I’m musing about how it was rather clever of my unconscious to offer up the cautionary tale of a nightmare patient visit in the form of an actual nightmare.

*

In May of 2012, I started my first unit of CPE: Clinical Pastoral Education. I had never heard of it before and I had no idea what it was.

Where did I get the nerve to think I could work with people in a hospital? I’d never shown any interest in medicine, sickness, or cures. My first experiences visiting people in the hospital as a child were borderline traumatic.

Ignorance and desperation. That’s where my nerve came from. A year after graduating from seminary, I had two degrees in theology and no desire to lead a church. I couldn’t remember anyone in seminary ever mentioning CPE (which is not to say no one ever did). But a hospital system in Alabama wanted to hire my first wife to lead a physical therapy department at a brand-new Wellness Center they were building in a suburb of Mobile. They needed me to agree to move there.

“Our new branch needs a chaplain,” a hospital administrator told me. “You need to complete a unit of CPE to qualify for the job.” He made arrangements for me to join the upcoming CPE unit that ended a few weeks before the new hospital would open.

This administrator wasn’t being transparent—or rather, he was string- ing sentences together that didn’t necessarily follow the rules of cause and effect. Probably he never had any intention of hiring me. In any case, before I even finished the unit, he hired someone else.

But I didn’t know that before the unit began, when I started scram- bling to learn more about CPE. I found a colleague, Greg, who had done “an intensive unit” the summer before. His responses to my questions about “what it was like” were at best indistinct and at worst alarming.

“Well”—He grimaced and lowered his voice—“I watched a lot of people die.”

“You watched a lot of people die?” I was about to find out this was one of the key elements of the whole enterprise. It’s a fundamental tool for being with people.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, what else? What is CPE?”

“I … I can’t—you know, man, I don’t want to talk about it.” And he turned and walked away.

I looked behind me, wondering if something had spooked him. The more I asked this question, the more I started to resemble Michael Doug- las’ character Nicholas in the 1997 movie The Game, in which Nicholas, a successful investment banker, receives a voucher for a mysterious gift billed only as “an entertainment service, but more than that.” No one will give Nicholas a clear description of what the game is, even when he overhears two men discussing it and asks them directly:

BUSINESSMAN 1
(to Businessman 2, knowingly)
Ahh, what is it?

BUSINESSMAN 2
The eternal question.

BUSINESSMAN 1
(to Nicholas)
I envy you. I wish I could go back and do it for the
first time all over again...

He raises his glass. They toast.

BUSINESSMAN 1
Here’s to... new experiences.
(gulps drink)
If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to be going.
‘Night, Jon... Nicholas.

[...]

BUSINESSMAN 2
You want to know what it is? What it’s all about?
(off Nicholas’ nod)
John. Chapter nine. Verse twen- ty-five.

NICHOLAS
I, uh... haven’t been to Sunday school in years...

BUSINESSMAN 2
“Whereas once I was blind, now I can see.”
(rises)
Night, Nick. Best of luck.

In the film, Nicholas accepts his gift despite its ambiguity. Soon after, the line between the game and his real life blurs and he descends into a surrealist nightmare.

As my friend Greg walked away, I wondered what the hell I was getting myself into. I read whatever I could find about hospi- tal chaplaincy and did all I could to prepare for the “game” I was signing up for. But I had no clear grasp on the rules. “If they say this, then I say…?”

I was so nervous. “But what if they can’t speak at all? Then what do I say?”

*

The Alabama weather didn’t help. I grew up in a small town in Northern California. So I’m used to the heat—humidity not so much. Walking the streets of Mobile through a cloud of tropical steam and the heady riot of fragrant orange blossoms, my brain felt as boiled as a lobster in a pot.

On the first day of class, I met the man I mistakenly referred to as my “professor”: Dr. Müller. He quickly corrected me: “Call me your educator. This is not a traditional classroom. Well—not in the modern sense, any- way. It’s more akin to the classical way of learning before modern traditionalism.”

Dr. Müller was a big guy, no more than five and a half feet tall and not quite wider than the table. A quiet Quaker man in his late seventies, he sat sideways at the head of the table with his thick fingers interlaced and resting on his belly, his eyeglasses balanced on the tip of his nose. One look into his eyes made me realize this guy saw through and into me in ways no one had before. Dr. Müller was made up of equal parts wis- dom, depth, and cynicism. A deep exhaustion showed in his every move- ment, countered only by a drive to keep going until he was physically un- able.

I was one of five students. Dr. Müller explained to us—sort of— what the unit of CPE would look like. “It’s eleven weeks, from today to mid-August. By the time you know where the elevators and bathrooms are, the unit will be done.”

I mustered a smile, but I still lacked context.

“Each of you will present ten verbatims. That’s one per week. We’ll have didactics and theological reflections. You’ll each present once for the interfaith chapel service. Now, I don’t mean to alarm you—or inspire you, for that matter—but by the end of this unit, your theology will probably change.”

We all stared back at him. My reaction was half repulsion, half cu- riosity. I had had seven years of training to develop my theological understanding, or at least to thoroughly absorb my professors’ theological understanding. How could all that change in such a short time?

“Okay,” Dr. Müller announced, “go find your units, introduce yourself to people, and start visiting patients.” Just as we were all about to rise, he raised a hand to stop us. “Oh, and one more thing.”

In the room was an easel with a flimsy whiteboard balanced on it. In a dusty box, Dr. Müller found a black dry-erase pen. With a shaking hand, he drew a hash mark on the left side of the board and another on the right. He connected them with a line and labeled them:

Birth Death
|----------------------------------------------\

He dropped the pen back in the box and rummaged around some more. I shifted uneasily in my seat, feeling my shoulders tense. The sum of a human being’s life from birth to death was laid out before me in three stark lines.

“Ah, there you are,” Dr. Müller said to the red pen and uncapped it.

He added one hash mark to the line:

Birth Death
|----------------------------------\------------\

“That red mark is ‘the most traumatic moment of a person’s life.’ Chances are, you’ll be there for it.” Dr. Müller dropped the pen in the box and shuffled back towards his seat. But I wasn’t watching him anymore; my eyes were fixed on the red mark.

“Okay,” he said from behind me, “now you can go find your units.”

[...]