“This can’t be happening,” I said to myself, after eating some cake.
So there was the “us” of the other chaplains and the “us” of my family and they meshed into each other to make one large “US” and they were looking at me like I was one of those fantastical beasts on the poster that should have been allowed to stay on that wall instead of a national park. Like if I were a dog I’d be Bobo Boy.
One thing about Bobo Boy was that he never doubted himself. He never wondered if the way he did things might not be the best way his type of things should be done. He was an artist at being a therapy dog.
I actually was saying to myself, “Maybe I’m an artist of a chaplain,” as if that would make it okay to be outside the us-ness.
Afterward, I escaped to the chapel and sank down in a pew. I’d only recently started thinking about the renovations project. The chapel was its same old businessy self: an afterthought of a space, meeting the minimum of a requirement.
The sugar buzz from the cake did not last long. I leaned back in the pew, letting myself drift. Just a rest.
I made it hard to love me. They’d told me so. All of them, many times.
Why do you have to make it so hard to love you?
No one would ever explain what that meant. I was supposed to know already. Just by being who I am.
It can be lonely for me in my family.
I’d been at the medical center a year or so when my sister and brothers pulled me aside at a holiday gathering to tell me I needed to stop sharing so much information about my job. Our parents didn’t want to mention it so they took it on themselves—could I ease up on the downer details? Did I have any idea how much I bummed everyone out? Could I put myself in their shoes and realize how they felt when they called me to ask how my day was and “someone passed” was part of the answer? Or there was a shooting or a fire or someone attacked someone with a knife, or someone very old and very sick and all alone pretended they didn’t care they had no visitors?
My sister has a friend whose brother is a pathologist. Their family had to do the same thing with him they were doing with me, I was told. They’d be sitting around a table digging into their turkey and dressing and he’d talk about guts and someone’s pancreas or something, and there would be puking.
Sometimes after a night shift when I’m in my bed trying to fall asleep in a hurry, my brain turns traitor on me and I’m stuck in a storm of images, like a movie on hyper-fast-forward: quick, flashing sights, memory sights, a patient I thought I’d forgotten, a bloody sheet, the face of a man in the moment he gets the news he’s now a widower. Sometimes, almost asleep, I feel the hurt of “Don’t tell us about your job unless it’s nice stuff,” and I half-awake dream I’m walking a hall filled with rooms in which certain memories of the last few years are stored, still raw to me, still fresh. I could call this hall “Rooms of Situations I Would Never Tell My Family About, Not That They’d Want to Know.”
In one room was a woman who’d been trapped in her house in a fire, and I was her chaplain. In moments of consciousness, all she said to me was how much she wished the firefighters had not saved her.
In another was a little boy whose father had forgotten to lock away his gun, and also to make sure it wasn’t loaded. I was that child’s chaplain. He was four years old. I had bowed low over him so he could pat my hair. My frizz for some reason had made him smile. For a while, it had seemed he’d pull through, but then he didn’t.
In another was a girl of twelve. A few of her girl classmates poured a bucket of urine on her, after boys lined up secretly to pee in it, because wouldn’t it be so funny, like something in Carrie? The girl went home and took a shower. Wearing only a towel, she ran out of her house, into the path of a moving car the driver had no time to stop. By the time I arrived at her bedside, it was too late. I was chaplain to her parents instead, listening to them ask me to pray that the people in the car that day would forgive their daughter for putting them through such an experience. After I did so, please, would I pray even harder that everyone who had teased her and mocked her and peed in the pail would go to hell and never ever get out, in case hell turned out to be a place you could eventually leave?
But I wasn’t at home in bed. I could not allow such images to take up space in my head today, sleepy as I was.
I tried to think instead about how good it felt to imagine fixing up the chapel. An adjoining room was a vacated office space I’d make a case for taking over. It felt good to imagine a wall being sledgehammered down, particles of sheet rock dust swirling.
I sat there. Just a little rest, in the stillness. I didn’t know I’d closed my eyes until I was blinking them open and looking at a pale, skinny guy I had not heard walk in. He was standing nearby, staring down at me, smiling at me. He looked as young as if he’d graduated from high school five minutes ago.
“Hi,” he said. “Were you, like, praying? Because if you were, I’ll just back off and you can get back to it.”
A quiet gravity was in his voice, which perhaps had been part of him his whole life. The first thing I noticed was that sense you get meeting someone you know right away does not make fun of other people. I thought of an expression I’d often heard from nurses briefing me on a new, young patient, sometimes even a child. A compliment, always said with admiration: “an old soul.”
I didn’t mind that he thought I was praying.
“I was looking for a chaplain,” he said. “You think you might have a couple minutes?”
This was Plummy. But he didn’t have that nickname yet. He would give it to himself, for my utterance only, because the plum is my favorite fruit and his favorite thing to lick the juice of off my lips. He was a senior in college. He would soon be off to grad school.
He had come to the medical center to interview staffers in trauma and recovery room situations.
His theory was that people just coming to consciousness from trauma or surgery might blurt out something weird that happened to them while they were out of it. Maybe, he theorized, patients who were talking, lying-down zombies would tell things to, like, a nurse, in a raw, uncensored way, before they had the time to reflect on it and decide they’d keep it to themselves, because no one would believe them. Or they’d tell it later, so it would fit in with normal stuff people say when they think about going to heaven.
“Near-death experiences” was a phrase he did not like to use. He liked the other one: “out of body.” But actually he called them oobs.
He had gathered no data. He’d been totally cold-shouldered. He had almost ignored the advice from a nurse, who he thought felt sorry for him, to go find a chaplain instead, since chaplains don’t have the option of saying things like, “Do not even try to be bothering me.”
The medical center is not, he found, user-friendly in terms of signs and directories saying where things are. Three people he stopped for directions to Pastoral Care didn’t know where it was. But the fourth pointed him in the direction of the chapel.
I slid over in the pew and he sat down beside me, the space between us about the length of a standard ruler, which immediately felt to me like too many wasted inches.
He was into the science of the human brain, he told me. He already had the credits to finish college, which he had started early. But he was sticking around to finish some projects. He kind of didn’t have that much of a social life. He kind of already had his name on a couple of papers published in, like, decent journals, and did I ever have a patient tell me about an oob?