Saying Goodbye

The other day, I said goodbye to my longest chaplain-patient relationship of the summer. The woman had checked in expecting to be here for a week, two weeks, tops, and ended up staying a full 42 days, only changing her room location once. The conditions of her departure were positive, and she's on the road to recovery. I'm grateful I was able to say goodbye to her and her family, since there are many times when a patient simply isn't there anymore when I arrive in the afternoon.

I won't know whether she recovers, though, because the chaplain-patient relationship is necessarily limited to the hospital. When she left, our relationship essentially ended. I've had a few patients this summer who were discharged and ended up back in St. Luke's, back on my census, but most patients say goodbye for good. Saying goodbye is, of course, a good thing, since you go to the hospital in order to be released from the hospital.

I'm learning that one of the most difficult parts of chaplaincy is the brevity of the relationships. Most patients stay for less than a week, which means I may only visit them once or twice. In those few visits, we may share significant conversations and poignant moments of prayer, but everything is compressed into a short, heavy few minutes spent together. What I ultimately get is little more than snapshots of each patient and each family: a brief glimpse into the life, the relationships, the dynamics, the story, the values, the resilience, and the personality of each individual. It's like only watching one scene of a movie or only hearing three lines of a song; you have an idea of what the complete work is like, and maybe you would even recognize that part if you encountered it again, but you're absolutely missing out on the beauty of the entire work.

There are benefits to the nature of the chaplain-patient relationship: such anonymity allows for a level of disclosure that is often difficult to attain with one's closest friends, and I usually don't know any patients long enough to be completely swallowed by an emotional connection to them. But it's tiring when my relationships change every week; I begin to miss the comfort of familiarity.

If nothing else, I have learned the value of shared boredom. Let me explain: if my very closest relationships, I have a few memories of very important, significant moments that we shared, but I have countless memories of very mundane, ordinary, and repetitive moments that we shared—and I think I value these memories more. So even though I love the memory of being in my older brother's wedding, I value much more my memories of riding in long car trips with my brothers, of eating dinners together, of watching television. Those memories are much less about what we were doing and much more about whom we were with.

The chaplain-patient relationship typically skips over the shallow and goes straight for the deep; and while this allows me to do important ministry and play a vital role in the life of the other person, I will admit that there are days when I feel like all I do is say goodbye.