All Saints’ Day

“I will go anywhere I hear her name.”

That’s the line I remember from a 2011 memorial service held at St. Thomas Midtown Hospital for parents who had lost a child due to miscarriage, stillbirth, or early infant death. The annual event was set aside for especially tender loss and as the hospital chaplain resident, I was invited to participate. Families who knew that tender loss intimately gathered in a space where prayers and reflections were shared. When names of their babies were read, parents and siblings came forward to light a candle in their memory.

It was a conversation after, the “Thank you for coming” type I shared as I made my way from family to family, that revealed a grieving mother’s wish to hear her daughter’s name spoken out loud. It was affirmation that her child was real, known, and loved.

Eleven years later, I’m still thinking about that truth.

When a person dies, their names are often buried with their bodies. We fear that the reminder will bring pain, as though the widower, parent, or orphan might have forgotten. But they don’t. Pain is there, regardless of what we do or don’t say.

What that mother said to me, to any of us approaching someone in grief, is that their person was. Is. Continues to be. And it’s okay to ask, “What was their name?”

For me, it’s David.

He wasn’t my son, my sibling, or my spouse – he was my mentor. We met in 2009, during my second year of graduate studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. I had learned that an internship in hospital chaplaincy was open to folks outside of ordained ministry and though I didn’t feel the pull to ordination, I did feel the pull to the work of pastoral care in a medical setting. For 24 years, my life story had been overshadowed by the death of my biological father just two weeks after I turned five. I knew how it felt to grieve.

What I didn’t know was how much further down that work would go, how deeply intimate it would dig. Walking into a room where any man who had the slightest resemblance to my stepdad (meaning only that it was an older man with grey hair) triggered the anticipatory grief I carried at the thought of losing another father. Walking into a different room where someone inquired about my work as a chaplain at a young age (and often as a woman) triggered insecurity. Walking into the chapel at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital after learning that a young cancer patient I recently met had died of leukemia triggered my doubt about God.

As my supervisor, it was David’s job to lead group discussions, assign articles and books, and evaluate my progress. As a human who had been in my shoes, it was his call to remind me that I was not alone. He was the one who told me and the four other interns who gathered with him once a week for seminar, “It isn’t our job to give people answers, it is our job to help them sit with the questions.”

 He sat with so many of mine.

The part-time, six-month internship was enough to keep me interested in the idea of serving in a full-time, twelve-month residency. And when that opportunity came a year later, it was David, again, who guided me through one of the most difficult and most beautiful experiences of my life. Alongside five other chaplain residents working in hospitals and hospice, I looked to David in moments of confidence and especially in moments of despair. He never failed to validate our gifts or our pain. He carried faith when we couldn’t carry it ourselves. He gave us space to believe and to doubt.

When our residency came to an end, David gave each of us hand-picked honors. Mine was the “Tattoo Award,” something I had been talking about throughout those twelve months of chaplaincy. It took eight more years to put ink on my skin and when I did so on my 40^th birthday, I chose the first line of my favorite Mary Oliver poem.

You do not have to be good.

David gave the Facebook photo a thumbs up.

In the early months of 2022, my fiancé and I started talking about the possibility of saying, “I do” in Nashville, the place I consider my spiritual home. David was the person I wanted to officiate. He knew so much of my history, including a brutal night during residency when a man scared me with his voice, temper, and potential, all made worse by alcohol. He was the first person to say the word “abuse” out loud when I broke down, again, in one of our weekly meetings while replaying the scene. He told me, over and over, that I deserved love that was safe. The thought of finding it was unimaginable but when it came, the thought of sharing the day with my mentor (and friend) who would pronounce us husband and wife was perfect.

Then in June 2022, David died.

In the church where I now work as Parish Administrator, the service for All Saints’ Day begins with a silent procession and the reading of names of friends and family who have died in the last year. Some are known among the congregation while others are known only as someone who mattered to someone else. David Nowlin was, is, continues to be the one who matters to me. And like a mother I met 11 years ago, All Saints’ Day 2022 found me in a place where I would hear his name.

It was balm.

In The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe, Fr. Richard Rohr reminds us that loss is both a part and gift of being human. He says, “In the practical order of life, if we have never loved deeply or suffered deeply, we are unable to understand spiritual things at any depth.”

Two more paragraphs down…

“The magnitude of tragedy puts everything else in perspective … Often this is the first birth of compassion, patience, and even love, as the heart is softened and tenderized through sadness, depression, and grief. These are privileged portals into depth and truth.”     

It comes as no surprise that another devout Catholic, Stephen Colbert, recently said much of the same. In conversation with Anderson Cooper, host of the podcast All There Is, Stephen spoke in depth about his earliest experience of loss. On September 11^th, 1974, when Stephen was only 10, a plane crash killed his father and two of his brothers. Reflecting on an experience that happened thirty-something years later, he shared:

“Literally walking down the street, I was struck with this realization that I had a gratitude for the pain of that grief. It doesn’t take the pain away. It doesn’t make the grief less profound. In some ways, it makes it more profound because it allows you to look at it. It allows you to examine your grief in a way that – it is not like holding up red hot amber in your hands, but rather seeing that pain as something that can warm you and light your knowledge of what other people might be going through.”

In the introduction to this second episode of his podcast, Anderson speaks about messages he received from those who listened to the first. The debut, “Facing What’s Left Behind,” is a vulnerable reflection on the process of packing up his late mother’s apartment – his late mother being Gloria Vanderbilt. What comes from sorting through boxes and memories are his father’s things, too. Like Stephen, Anderson lost his father when he was only 10. About those messages, he says, “So many of you have been willing to share with me the names of your loved ones who have died and how you faced and are still facing their loss and that sadness. As isolating and lonely as grief can be, as sadness can be, it’s also something that links all of us together. And I’m really grateful for that.”

As much as we want to hear the names of our saints, we want to say them, too.

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A note for anyone who has been through Clinical Pastoral Education, especially with David.

At the end of this essay, I understand that the anticipatory grief I carried/carry about losing another father was about losing David, too. Being the great mentor that he was and still is, there’s no way he would have let me get by without seeing it. If you knew him, you know he would have been delighted to push that button and willing to sit in that pain.

Thank you, Sir.