A great way to stop a conversation cold with someone I am meeting for the first time is to let out that I was a hospice chaplain for seven years. It’s good to know that most readers of this blog would take this as a sublime conversation-starter instead.
As I reflected with a funeral director after a graveside service recently, it is curious that even professionals and others involved with death, including hospice chaplains, funeral directors, Chevrah Kadisha members, bereavement counselors, and so on, vary in their comfort level with it. Thus even with the pros, our fear of death surfaces surrounding some aspect of it. I told that funeral director I would never want to trade places with her. She in turn responded that she would not want to work as a chaplain and to have to deal with the family’s emotions preceding the death. I returned that I would not like to be in her shoes because I would be squeamish about handling the bodies.
Although a Chevrah Kadisha member might never want to be a hospice chaplain, and vice versa, we can expand our envelope of comfort by reading about each other’s niches, thereby making ourselves more available to a wider spectrum of people’s needs. The core challenge of a hospice chaplain is to create a safe sacred space free of religious agendas for patients to process their experience as they approach their end. I strive to do this with open-ended questions and completely and profoundly focused listening. For a concrete illustration of what I mean, please see my August 6th blog post “>Encountering the Edge: What People Told Me Before They Died , a series of true anecdotes capped with the deeper reasons she chose her vocation. Published in April 2014, this book opened to smash reviews. For more details and to see the reviews, you can go to the “>amazon.com. Comments to the author are welcome by email or via her blog,
