Tag: bus stories

#24X: Bellevue Express

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Thanksgiving

“It hurts when they use those paddles. Feels like you’ve been kicked in the chest. I got kicked three times.”

It was the fourth Thursday of November and Bob was back. We had met a few weeks prior when his name was on the list of official requests for a chaplain visit. What I knew up front was that he was in his early 70s, had a medical history that included hypertension and a heart attack, and he used to be a Baptist preacher.

The last part was the one that intimidated me the most. It was still early in my residency year, and I often questioned if I was a suitable candidate to walk through a door and claim myself a chaplain. Sure, I had experienced a lot of grief. Sure, I had studied theology. But with a background that included some wounding from my own Baptist experience, I was triggered from the moment I saw that piece of information under his name.

Bob couldn’t have been more welcoming. “I love chaplains!” was his first response to my introduction. “Come in. Come in.”

As was customary, there was some superficial conversation to get us started. The room was big. His bed was comfortable. He liked the nurses.

Somewhere along the way, Bob mentioned that he was looking forward to all of the work being done on the townhouse he shared with his wife, Shirley. It had been damaged in the flood of 2010 and a year-and-a-half later, their home was still in a work-in-progress. There’s only so much that can be done at a time when you’re living on a fixed income and your body “ain’t what it used to be.”

He had also survived prostate cancer and was being monitored due to a recent spike in his blood sugar.

Seeing Bob’s name on the patient roster on Thanksgiving Day tugged at my already fragile heart. I was a few days out from a different kind of flood and trying to make some sense of God – and myself. The hallways were much quieter that day with a smaller number of folks on staff and every measure possible taken for patients to spend the holiday at home. If you didn’t have to be there, you wouldn’t be.

Bob had to be there.

When I first passed by his room, I noticed that he was having his holiday meal and opted to let him enjoy it without interruption. About 15 steps down the hall, I realized that having a holiday meal alone, in a hospital and with his medical and emotional history, was not a call to leave him be.

I knocked on the open door. “Hey, Bob. How’s the turkey today?”

“Not worth much, but the stuffing was alright. Come on in.”

We made it through the surface-level stuff within those first few sentences. He remembered our previous visit and I found myself wanting to stay.

“Do you mind if I pull up a chair?” I asked.

“Come right on,” he said. “What did you do to get put here today? They could use the help. That’s for sure.”

“Well, that’s just kinda how it ended up and right now, I’m glad I’m here. How are you?”

Bob was wearing his age more than he had just a few weeks prior. His unshaven beard matched the fatigue listed on his record. That and another round of elevated blood sugar found him in a cramped room, likely the consequence of availability of both space and staff.

“I didn’t want to come in, but Shirley wouldn’t let it go. The night before Thanksgiving and I’m on my way to the hospital. Hardly anybody’s paying attention. Can’t be that different than if I would have waited.”

“And this room is awful.”

He was right. The light was the worst kind of artificial and the walls were a reminder that this was the hospital’s oldest building. Shirley’s cot was to the right of Bob’s bed and took up what little space was left between him and the window. She had stayed overnight and was currently in the cafeteria picking up her own Thanksgiving meal.

“I don’t know how anybody gets better in a room like this,” he said. “Did I tell you I was here for over a month back in September?”

“Yeah, I do remember you saying that.”

“I was supposed to be DNR (Do Not Resuscitate). Thought I had signed the papers. I guess Shirley made ’em do it.”

He paused.

“It hurts when they use those paddles. Feels like you’ve been kicked in the chest. I got kicked three times.”

No one tells you the thing that’s going to save your life is going to hurt so much. I had just spent the past few days knowing it to be true.

“How are you feeling about it now, Bob?”

He got teary. “I’m so angry. Why didn’t they just let me go? I’m ready. I’ve had a good life, been able to do lots of good things. I don’t want to hurt Shirley, but I can’t keep doing this – in and out of the hospital. It’s no life. It’s Thanksgiving Day and I’m here again.”

His honesty was holy.

I struggled between wanting to make it better and wanting to let it be.

Then Shirley walked in the room.

“Did you know they’re giving lunches to the people who are working today? No matter the families that are here – we have to pay. She did give me the water for free.”

The dynamic changed.

“Isn’t this room just awful?” she continued. “I think I’m gonna open the curtain.”

It was one thing she could control.

We talked a bit more about the difference between the room I had first met them in and the room where we were that day. Shirley was obviously frustrated with the whole of the situation, likely a response to her simultaneous desire and inability to make things better. After fussing around her lunch she decided to step out again.

Bob had shared some stories about his own ministry and how he got his call to preach three months after he gave up drinking. He was especially grateful for the time he spent in Kenya. I took the opportunity to move in a bit closer so I could lower my voice, just in case Shirley returned.

“You know what? I think, when you meet God, God is going to say, ‘Well done.’”

“I sure hope so.”

He started to cry again.

“I’ve tried but this last part is the part that’s a little too hard.”

“Do you tell God when you’re having a hard time?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Do you think God understands?”

“Yeah, I think he does.”

“Y’all okay in here?” Shirley asked as she came back in the room. The IV pole started beeping and she was quick to comment.

“Hope we can get somebody in here to fix that.”

Bob assured her that he would call the nurse and asked if I would offer a prayer before I left.

“Of course. Do you have anything special you want to pray for today?”

“I think you probably know.”

I mumbled through some words about Bob’s life and ministry and asked God to draw close in his time of need. It was the only way I could address the depression and subtly recognize that Bob was asking to die while also not wanting to pray for Bob to die.

Eleven years later, I still don’t know if those words were right, wrong, or both. I also don’t know what happened after that visit. I kept an eye out for Bob’s name, but I never saw him again.

That’s one of the harder parts of chaplain work – not knowing. Some patients are long-term and open-book, and others go home before you have a chance to meet. Some, like Bob, show up twice and stay with you, especially on the fourth Thursday of November.

#43: Hickory Hills

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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.

Continue reading “#43: Hickory Hills” →

#76: Madison Connector

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Babel

I spent half of my first 18 years in two residences without a permanent foundation.

Until the age of five, it was a singlewide trailer.

From 14 through 18, it was a double.

Trailers (or mobile homes, if you want it to sound a little less poor) are common in rural Appalachia, as I’m sure they are in the rural Midwest and the rural other places. They’ve even become somewhat chic in parks where those who choose to live in a house on wheels, decorated with mismatched vintage furniture and adorned with strands of lantern lights, sip kombucha and jam on their ukuleles while the cool kids next door knit sweaters for their purebred ferret.  

My family didn’t have a ferret in either, though we did share life in and around the double with plenty of cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, and goats, including one who broke free from the local feed store and found his way to the land my brother was clearing for his future home – complete with a permanent foundation. The double also came with plush, blue carpet and three bathrooms. Compared to only one in the single and one in the in-between house, we were on the cusp of highfalutin. 

I didn’t, and still don’t talk about either trailer very much, but I hear it and feel it in vulnerable moments. It’s one of the subjects that’s still acceptable to joke about by those who have never known the thinness of mobile home walls or the way cold air comes up through the floor if cinder blocks and underpinning are enough to pass inspection, but short on protecting the entirety of the home’s underside from weather’s emotional baggage. 

Once upon a time, I even laughed along when I heard someone joke about the University of Kentucky basketball fans not having to worry about finding or paying for a hotel because their house could travel. I didn’t want anyone to know that two of mine had. 

At another gathering with dear friends, one I had organized at a favorite Italian spot in Nashville where I had shared birthday drinks and reunion dinners, I found myself trying to fit into a conversation about Europe. One of the women among us was planning an incredible solo adventure and others were commenting on their favorite spots in Italy or how you never know bread until you’ve eaten a French baguette – in France. As the only person at the table who had never been overseas and had barely traveled west of the Mississippi, I offered my “Oohs” and “Aahs” and, “Oh, that sounds lovely” and, “I’ll have to add it to my list!” with each passing landmark or regional wine I did not, and likely still do not know.

It is a difficult thing to be among the many who don’t speak your language, especially when you so deeply desire to be fluent in theirs. 

Or affluent in theirs. 

My sister, four years older though always much more in terms of responsibility, worked third shift at Walmart during the same years we were both in school. I was studying theology as a graduate student, and she was working on an associate degree to become a Medical Assistant. It was her second degree, too – the first having prepared her for college transfer. She had spent some time at the university where I completed my undergraduate degree, but she quickly realized that it wasn’t the right fit. Even so, she left with a 4.0.

The differences between our lives in those two years were reflective of that language piece. She went on little to no sleep from Walmart to clinicals, paying her own way through the education that would give her a career. I borrowed ridiculous amounts of money from the government to spend time in an environment where I gave into the “Walmart is the devil” mentality of social justice efforts that failed to admit or even acknowledge that shopping elsewhere is a privilege. I have no regrets about my education, but I do regret not speaking my life, or hers, out loud. 

It’s the same regret I have for forcing my accent to go away in college because I bought into the assumption that sounding Southern meant sounding uneducated. Movies and television shows will use that twang on a character to dumb them down or sweeten them up, but rarely to show a smart woman working her way through the Biblical Hebrew lexicon.

The things we do to make ourselves fit hurt our selves.

By late 2014, I recognized that the language of the city where I lived was no longer the language of my then current life. Elizabeth Gilbert talked about this in Eat, Pray, Love – about the truth that people and places have words. For Rome, the word was sex. For Liz, it was attraversiamo. For New York City, it was achieve. I was beginning to see that the word for Nashville was something like develop, though not the kind that broadens your thoughts. Things were going up for the sake of saving space. Taller. Skinnier. Pricier. 

My word was breathe, something I hadn’t been doing too well for those months I had just passed in depression and hopelessness, but it was the word I carried around on the back of my iPod shuffle. Engraving was an option at order so I did it to remind myself that in any moment, the only thing we have to do is breathe. 

On Thanksgiving night, 2014, I decided to leave development for breath. It was a spontaneous decision, but a necessary one. The day after Thanksgiving, 2014, I hopped on the #76 to start knocking out the routes I had left to ride before bidding farewell to Music City and the Nashville MTA. It had been my transportation lifeline for most of my city living and had given me opportunities to see beyond the Batman Building skyline and reflect on my own story, as well as the stories that stepped on and off at each stop.

At one of those stops on the Madison Connector, a man sitting near the front heard something familiar, an accent, when another man stepped on the bus. After establishing, in English, that the second man was from Miami, the two started speaking in Spanish. Man #1 changed seats and joined his new friend for the rest of his ride, talking up things that I didn’t understand, but could feel. It’s a wonderful thing to be among even one who speaks your mother tongue. 

Sometimes it takes a different language to recognize how much you love your own.

Maybe Babel was a gift.