Life Lessons from a Hospice Chaplain.

From Readers Digest:

Listen closely and you will hear what terminal patients have foremost in their minds.  It's not what you think.
by Kerry Egan

As a 26-year-old student at Harvard Divinity School, I had just begun working as a student chaplain at a cancer hospital when my professor asked me about my work.  "I talk to the patients," I told him.  "What do people who are sick and dying talk to the student chaplain about?" he asked.  "Mostly we talk about their families," I responded.  "Do you talk about God?”  "Not usually."  "Or their religion?"  "Not so much."  "The meaning of their lives?"  "Sometimes."  "And prayer?  Do you lead them in prayer?"  "Sometimes," I said.  "But not usually, not really."  I felt derision creeping into the professor's voice.  "So you visit people and talk about their families?"  "They talk," I said.  "I mostly listen."  

 A week later, I sat in a large lecture hall as the same professor told a packed room the story about a student he once met (me) who was a chaplain intern at a hospital.  "And I asked her, 'What exactly do you do as a chaplain?'  And she replied, 'Well, I talk to people about their families.'"  He paused for effect.  "That was this student's .understanding of faith!"  The students laughed.  "I thought to myself," he continued, "that if I were ever sick and dying in the hospital, the last person I would ever want to see is some Harvard Divinity School student chaplain wanting to talk to me about my family."  My body went numb with shame.  I thought, maybe, if I were a better chaplain, I would know how to talk to people about big spiritual questions.  Maybe if dying people met with a good, experienced chaplain, they would talk about God like they were supposed to.  Today, 13 years later, I am a hospice chaplain.  I visit people who are dying-in their homes, in hospitals, in nursing homes.  And if you were to ask me the same question-What do people who are sick and dying talk about with the chaplain?-without hesitation or uncertainty, I would give you the same answer.  Mostly they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters.

 They talk about how they learned what love is, and what it's not.  They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave.  Often they talk about love they did not receive, or the love they did not know how to offer, the love they withheld, or the love they maybe never felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally.  And sometimes, when they are actively dying, fluid gurgling in their throats, they reach their hands out to things I cannot see, and they call out to their parents: Mama, Daddy, Mother.  What I did not understand when I was a student is that people talk to the chaplain about their families because that is how we talk about God.  That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives.  Family is where we first experience love and where we first give it.  It's probably the first place we've been hurt by someone we love, and hopefully the place we learn that love can overcome even the most painful rejection.  We don't have to use the words of theology to talk about God.  People who are close to death almost never do.  We should learn from those who are dying that the best way to teach our children about God is by loving each other wholly and forgiving each other fully.