Collide

I’ve been a sports fan my entire life. I grew up just outside Detroit, so my teams have always been the Detroit Tigers (baseball), the Detroit Red Wings (ice hockey) and the Detroit Pistons (basketball). I’m not particularly a fan of American football, but if the Detroit Lions win I’m happy. Now that I have lived half my life in Arizona, I tend also to be a fan of the Arizona Diamondbacks (baseball) and the Phoenix Suns (basketball) when they aren’t playing Detroit teams. I vividly recall the wonderful 7-game World Series in 2001. When Luis Gonzalez hit a little looping single in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the game and the title, I jumped up screaming and accidentally slammed my hand into a ceiling fan; it was sore for a week. Yesterday while searching YouTube for random sports videos, I found the outstanding HBO documentary “Nine Innings from Ground Zero” about that World Series – and, more to the point, about the resiliency of the people of New York City after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. While many quotes stuck out to me, what inspired this blog was the comments from two of the Yankees – third baseman Scott Brosius and manager Joe Torre – when they met with people at the Armory. Most were still waiting to find out if their loved ones were alive -and, if not, would they have any physical remains. Brosius said, “I felt completely out of place….what am I doing here? What do I have to offer these people?” These words really resonated with me, because in my training as a chaplain, I found myself asking those questions at least once a day. Then Torre shared the moment that sticks out in his mind. Outfielder Bernie Williams had gone up to a woman, and said, “I don’t know what to say, but you look like you need a hug.” I thought, now there’s a guy who would make a great chaplain. We spend so much of our time doing that we often overlook how important simply being is. It is a lesson I continually learn as a chaplain.

We want so badly to be able to fix things, to make things better. The first and most difficult lesson to learn in chaplaincy is that This. Will. Never. Happen. Of course it’s also true that it’s not my job to fix (this is sort of a peripheral part of that first lesson). Over time, as we encounter crisis after crisis with different people, different situations and different places, we learn how to mine – very carefully – the entire scenario in front of us, searching for precious pearls to hang onto and share at the opportune moment. Something as simple as a hug from a stranger – be it a chaplain or a famous athlete – can help a person going through trauma. Other times it is something far less tangible.

It was 5:15 in the afternoon and I was making rounds in the ER. A woman in her mid-80s was on a stretcher in the hall awaiting a room; she and her best friend (both widows) shared that her legs had been giving her problems, and her friend had insisted they go to emergency. She’d resisted, and her friend all but dragged her to the hospital. The doctor had made it plain to the patient that she owed her friend her life; apparently she had life threatening clots. While she spoke of how she valued this friendship, suddenly the overhead blared: CODE BLUE. FIVE. ROOM 19. CODE BLUE. FIVE. ROOM 19.” The number five was the indicator that the code was occurring in the ER itself (so a doctor was already present). The patient looked at me somberly and said, “that’s bad, isn’t it?” I didn’t feel comfortable being fake; I simply acknowledged that it was and bid farewell since I was the on-call chaplain and headed around the corner and down the hall to room 19. Amid the flurry of activity, I saw that the doctor present was every chaplain’s favorite doctor. I’d taken to calling him JD due not only to his dedication to medicine, but to his strong resemblance to actor Zach Braff, who gave delightful life to the character John “JD” Dorian for nine years on the television show “Scrubs”. One of the RNs came over and led me down the hall toward the family waiting room, explaining the back story: the patient was a 3-year-old girl who had chased the family dog out of the house, through the backyard and down into the Colorado River. I was the first to arrive in the waiting room; within a few minutes I was joined by two Hispanic females: a 20-something woman and a girl about 14, both of whom were soaked from the waist down. Their jeans were caked with sand and mud. As time passed, I learned that they were the mother and the aunt, respectively, and that they’d dredged the river as long as they could trying to find her. We sat together for about 15 minutes before the RN came and spoke with me first, then beckoned Mom and Aunt. The medical team was still coding the little girl, but they were not receiving a response. One thing I always respected about “JD” was his belief that parents needed to be aware of what was going on. He asked that the mother be brought in so that she could see for herself that efforts to revive her daughter were fruitless, so that she would better understand that the course of action to follow was to allow the medical team to cease treatment. She did so, then collapsed next to the gurney.

The next hour was a blur; during that time, her father and her stepmother (the child’s grandparents) arrived and both were tremendous sources of support to the mom and her younger sister. The poor aunt was so young she appeared overwhelmed by it all. When we had to explain that due to the circumstances surrounding the girl’s death, Mom would not be allowed to take her home, she really broke down. She and her family reverted to Spanish as they grieved and comforted each other and interacted with me. Until two weeks ago, she told me, she’d been living in San Diego with her common-law husband of nine years. He’d been abusive to her the entire time, she admitted. She had always been afraid to admit that he’d been a mistake and that she should not have left Arizona. But when the abuse extended to their child she finally got up the courage to leave him. Now she started fearfully wandering down that road….”if only I’d stayed in San Diego”, she began, but I would not allow her to continue on that thought. Instead we spoke of her relationship with her stepmother (the mother of the teenage aunt); it was clear that the two were close. I said I was glad to hear that. After about an hour and some, the RNs finally had to tell us that the family needed to leave since the coroner was coming. Mom was unable to walk without assistance; her father on her left and I on her right, we helped her out to his white Ford pickup. Along the way, I kept asking myself those questions. What am I doing here? What do I have to offer these people?

In the end, it was spontaneous, as it often is. As she sat down on the passenger side, I held her arm, looked into her eyes and said firmly in Spanish, “You’re a good Mom. You got your daughter out of a horrible situation.” I could see that the words hit their mark; there was acknowledgment in her face. I knew that it would not last and that the grief would return in tidal waves, but I also knew that she would remember those words in the future. I wanted to be there to remind her of this again and again, but it doesn’t happen like that. The second tough lesson we learn as chaplains is that we are rarely or never around to see the outcome of these situations – we’re only present for a short time, so we try to find those pearls and offer them as solidly as possible and then move on to the next person, the next crisis. Our lives collide briefly, as lives did on September 11, 2001. When we have the privilege of offering hope and the possibility of a life after all this, we strengthen our community – and in doing so, we strengthen humanity.