"Love is Watching Someone Die"

"But I'm thinking of what Sarah said,

'Love is watching someone die'

So who's going to watch you die?"

Its been a long week in CPE, and this post has been a long time coming. Its reflections from what happened while I was on call between Sunday evening and early Monday morning, but I haven't been able to bring myself to write it, even with all of the thoughts that are moving in my head and stirring in my heart.

My supervisor has noticed that I have been more quiet this week, and when I do speak I have been soft spoken. I told him that I just have too many thoughts to verbalize, about who I am, about what I experienced this past week, about who I am called to be as a ministering person. And the story came out:

Sunday pm - Monday am shift was long. And crazy busy. I had ten traumas, including one with a horrible case of police mis-identification making it hard to track down a family until the State Police got involved, one code, and two end of life ministries. Literally I was able to lie on the cot for a grand total of thirty minutes and not consecutively, but in two short bursts. The beeper would not be still in its chirping. I kept getting what I thought were duplicate pages for the same trauma when really they were different events needing attention at the same time.

A bit before midnight I got a page for a level 2 trauma which was upgraded to a level 1 in route. While I was listening to the trauma recorder, my pager went off again with a number to call. The voice that answered was in the ER, and told me that an eighteen year olds parents were getting bad news and I should be there. Bad news would be an understatement. They were being told that their son who they had been with during his battle with cancer for the past two years. He was in remission only to be told that he was going to die of a brain bleed. And quickly. I felt so helpless and even now as I think of their faces and their son's I begin to weep. There is something tragic about so much potential being taken away too soon. He was just going to start his life, just getting over the battle only to lose the war by a surprise opponent.

In the middle of this the family needed time alone, so I left. As I was leaving I got paged to a second end of life ministry on my unit, ICU. A man was actively dying. For the next two hours I sat with a devoted wife, 5 out of the 6 children, and 3 of the 15 grandchildren, watching a man struggling for breath. With each moment, I just wanted to scream, please God take him, he is suffering so much. But instead tears formed in my eyes. Watching his elderly wife muster all of her strength and even then needing help to get out of her wheelchair and whisper in his ear that she loved him and that it was okay to go. Watching the siblings struggle with the absence of their one sibling. Hearing stories and laughter coupled with sobbing.

What was my part in this time? At first I felt like an intruder, just sitting back as a ministering presence. But then... then I realized that I was on holy ground. A family I did not know had invited me to part of their most intimate moment. I offered pray about 45 minutes in. And when I had arrived I asked what the man's favorite song was, which lead me to sing Amazing Grace from a deep place that reflected emotions I had never fully felt before in this way. And other then that I sat, and was peace amongst the storm of transition from this life to the next.

At 8:30am this patient breathed his last. When I was in group time that morning with my peers I shared only a bit about this experience, because it was too difficult to put words to an encounter this close to the holy. Several of my peers had dealt with this patient the day before when he had arrived in the ER. All they could ask me was what I said to bring this family comfort. I said barely anything. And neither did they. Talking wasn't important. Because we were communing with the Holy.

And then I realized that this is what defines my ministry, not speaking but being. It has for a while, coming out of the moments when I felt closest to God. Silent moments where I could just rest in the presence of another person, who wasn't looking to talk and try to convince me of feeling better. And in the still silence, God was there. God is there. I don't need to minister like others and I don't need to conform to their ideas of what I was to do, because the Holy Spirit will lead me to do what I need to in each individual situation. Praise God for being able to weep with those who mourn.