“We’re sorry to give you bad news, but people here just aren’t into chaplains anymore, not that we’re saying we think you’re completely obsolete,” said the office in charge of the cuts, in more or less those words.
There was some type of study, carried out without telling us. Our resistance was futile. Our tries for outside funding were not successful.
That office is the same one I had hounded for chapel money. The faces are different now. The new ones are neither friendly nor hostile. They speak in voices neither soft nor loud, as if they took classes in how to talk all day in one tone only.
One of the lay chaplains who lost his job claimed he had counted how many offices there were for everyone who had nothing to do with healing and caring for patients. He said there were more for “the corporate business of the hospital” than for anything else. I don’t know if he was exaggerating.
The head of my department in his usual way of being who he is advised me to remember we are ministers and Please do not walk around mad like you’re marching in a protest, because it’s our job to make the thing we call hope, and it’s our job to make some light when light is absent, and look, here we still are, like the spruces and pines and hemlocks that didn’t get chain-sawed, and we’re listening to the wounded and sick, to families in waiting rooms, to volunteers who read and sing and put on puppet shows for children who will not outlive their childhoods, and also to a nurse, an aide, a doctor, an EMT, a firefighter, a cop, who has just seen something they can’t speak of, because words will not come to their mouths, because they need instead to bow their heads with a chaplain and privately, safely weep, before standing back up and returning to duty.
It was now eleven o’clock. Showtime, as I used to once say.
Six
I am loved in my family in a sticky, primal way where one day they’re all ganging up on me for being so different from them, and the next, they’re gladly turning their eyes my way, because I entered a room where they are, and the pieces that did not fit together in a whole became suddenly whole, and all right again.
If I didn’t resemble them physically, I would have thought I’d been adopted.
They will never stop calling me the baby. Or their pinkie, like I’m the tiny finger on a hand that does not have a thumb.
I was a late-born. My sister and brothers are so much older, it had seemed, when they all showed up for some school event, I was being raised by a team made up of a grandmother, a grandfather, an aunt, two uncles.
They have big personalities. They make noise. They are shockingly, robustly athletic. In the house where I grew up, stopwatches were in the silverware drawer, swimming goggles on a coat rack, trophies on shelves that in another house might hold books—and those trophies bore everyone’s name but mine. I used to trip all the time on their skates, racquets, balls, helmets, sticks, cleats, bicycle gear, ski boots, golf bags, gym bags.
I never felt an urge to take up a sport or remain in a room where a game was on television. I liked the Olympics for the processions and flags. Until I was well into school, I liked being brought to the golf club my parents still belong to. I made friends with groundskeepers, and they let me run around in the mists of a morning, barefoot in the grass, slipping on poop of the geese who had not been run off the greens, laughing when I took a tumble, lying in the grass as the dew seeped into me, then jumping up when I saw a crew cart on the way. I’d fist my hand and stick out my thumb like a baby hitchhiker.
My family loves birthdays and so did I until the birthday was mine and I was turning thirty.
I did not see it coming that thirty would be a wall I hit when I didn’t know a wall was right in front of me. Where was everything I had thought I would have by now—a husband, a little house with a yard, a baby in a sling at my chest? And I’d bring my baby to work sometimes when maternity leave was over? What about all of that?
I had not been lucky with boyfriends, not in the sense of “this is going to last.”
My sister showed up in my office one day, when I was running out of being in my twenties. No one else was around. She brought me an extra-large baggie of her homemade granola, to which she had added, special for me, chocolate chunks and salted pecans. Of course I was aware that something was up.
She wanted to take my photo, just to do it. No reason, except that she was looking through family pictures and didn’t find any of me she liked, and please would I cooperate? Please would I smile?
She and I aren’t sisters who go out and do things together. A week or two can pass by when we have no contact. We do not have talks with a beginning and end, a hello and good-bye. There has always been one conversation only, no matter the subject, left off and picked up, her and me, as if time doesn’t matter between us.
She had never mentioned her interest in putting me online on a dating site, but I know her.
She said, “Brush your hair and take off your collar.” She had read somewhere that men on dating sites would rather not respond to a woman in one, even men who themselves wear a collar.
There wasn’t a photo. She wanted to take back the granola. But I’d already put it in a drawer, which I stood in front of so she couldn’t open it.
I did not want a party for my thirtieth birthday. Everyone knew that. I wanted to go to work and go home with Chinese takeout and a bottle of wine and watch some sad old movies I’d seen before, so I didn’t have to wonder what would happen or how they’d end, and I could just sit there and be sad.
Then there they were, on a Saturday at two in the afternoon. My department was having a special meeting that began with friendly cheers to me for the day. Then around our conference table we were all in serious moods. We were going over new disaster protocols: who would do what, who would go where, who would be able to double-shift if called for, and who wouldn’t.
There they actually were, walking in, the whole original unit, having not brought my brother-in-law, my sisters-in-law, and at least a few of my nieces and nephews, which they had thought about doing, but felt it might all be a bit too much.
They brought a sheet cake, chocolate with buttercream frosting, my favorite. I could not believe how glad I was that the candles weren’t those tricksters where you blow and they don’t go out. I fell for it before because they always said that this time, they weren’t using the joke ones.
The cake was made by a professional baker. The message written on the frosting was in letters made of dark chocolate, all capitals.
the
REV
is
30!!!
The zero in the “30” was a pink-frosting heart. My colleagues were up on their feet like they were welcoming a team of champions. How could I have kept it a secret I belonged to these people?
And soon it was a party in there. Of course they took over. They did that everywhere. It was jokes and sports talk and how my hair was always frizzy since I had hair on my head at all, and I was such a surprise of a baby, honest to God, my mother was amazed to find out she was pregnant—she’d thought menopause was starting early. And this and that and oh my God, did I ever talk at work about the bombshell I dropped about converting to being a Protestant and going to seminary?
Shocking was the word for it. Always as far as it was known, on both sides of the family, everyone was a Catholic—not what you’d call regular practitioners, to be honest about it. However, that wasn’t the reason for the shock. Had I let on I used to be wild? Was it clear to everyone at the medical center that I probably didn’t even believe in any sort of actual, organized, regular religion, but that was okay because there needs to be chaplains for people who march to the beat of a different drummer, not that I’m basically a pagan with a white band around my neck?