My name is Joon, online I go by J.S. Before I start, as is Korean tradition, I’d love to take a selfie with all of you. And I will be doing video and of course, have my peace sign ready to go. Sure, so stay on that sign. Do they want me to thank you for indulging me? That’s a selfie. You are now bound; you are family. If you come to my house for Korean barbecue, please leave your shoes at the door.
I’m a hospital chaplain. I’ve been a chaplain for nine years, that is, nine years of tending to death, dying, illness, injury, hundreds, if not thousands of deathbeds. And I want to share with you today about something that happened to me at month 13, and that is when I lost my faith. I did come back around, but in its wake, I was not the same. I was seeing so much death and dying that this bizarre and strange thing began happening to me: I began to see and hear the dead.
For a little context, um, if you’re not sure what a chaplain is, I wish they would tell me. Um, the technical definition of a chaplain is a non-anxious, non-judgmental, comforting presence- grief support. I guess the non-technical definition is this is the most I will talk all week. I just listen mostly. I listen. I work at a Level 1 trauma center. It’s 1,000+ beds, and I respond to every death, every code blue, and every trauma: Level 1 trauma includes gunshot wounds, stabbings, fire, falls, car accidents, stroke, drowning electrocution. When I meet my patients and their families, very often, I am meeting them in the worst moment of their lives.
So what ended up happening to me? I was seeing so much death and dying that around month 12, I got into my car late at night after work, and I heard a voice behind me. It was one of my patients who had died. “Chaplain,” I turned around, and of course, he wasn’t there. But I began to hear the dead all the time. All of my patients who died, I would hear them late at night in my car. I would hear them in my home at night. Hear them down the hallway. And then I’d be talking with a friend or family member, coworker, someone across the dinner table, and I would get this lightning bolt across my vision, and suddenly I would picture them flipped over in a car or intubated or their faces blue in a morgue. And as I was talking to my family or friend, what I would imagine is climbing them, as if they were a tree, to the top of their heads and staying there, refusing to come down, as if I could keep the tree of their life from getting cut down.
And then I got obsessed with time. I would keep looking at clocks, and every second that passed, it was like a loud church bell in my head. And then I’d have these nightmares of my patients sitting upright in their beds, getting closer and closer, close enough to breathe my hair apart. And then I would wake up with my hands over my face, and then I would lean over my wife, very still, to see if she was still breathing. Thankfully, she never caught me staring at her in her sleep.
So, month 13, I go to my supervisor for a weekly one-on-one supervision. Jenny, one of the great role models of my life. I tell her what’s happening, and I tell her this cryptic statement: “I am without anchor.” And Jenny, she takes out a piece of paper, and she draws me a box, and then she crosses out the sides, and she says, “This is your faith right now, your worldview, your perspective. It’s being broken, and however it turns out, it will be different.” And then she draws another box, and it looks like this misshapen trapezoid, and she tells me that this is what my faith, my worldview, my belief system might turn into. And I tell her, “For real? But I, I like my box. I’ve had my whole life. This is where I put all my stuff. I don’t even like trapezoids.” She said, “Huh.” I said, “Nothing, nothing.” And she tells me, “I have to tell you a bad secret.” I wanted to tell her, “No, you keep your secrets.” She says, “Every chaplain who has ever come through here gets their box exploded.”
My box, my faith, my blueprint. We all have one. It’s a formula or a belief about how we believe the world ought to operate, and sometimes that’s ascribed by a divine order. And mine was this very basic formula. It was like load-bearing supports, and generally, it can work, and for you, your belief system generally works until maybe a crisis or trauma or tragedy enters in. My box, my formula, my blueprint was a one-wall: If I can make good choices, next wall, I will get ideal outcomes, leading to safety and stability. Good choices, ideal outcomes, safety, and stability. And I know, even as I say that, that that is a very naïve, optimistic view of upward mobility. And it’s not that I expected a perfect one-to-one ratio return of investment, but I knew, even as life doesn’t always work out, I did not expect to see, at the bedside of suffering, my ideas, and my patients’ ideas of meaningful choices, outcomes, and plans, and their safety obliterated over and over.
I didn’t expect to see the degree of suffering. It’s not that pain existed, but the degree of pain which could overwhelm and overtake my patients. I was seeing spouses die the same week they were married, babies born to die, the transplant didn’t take. We tried everything, but I’m sorry to tell you, but, we tried everything, but, he’s gone, she’s dead, he’s died, she’s gone. We tried everything, but. I repeatedly woke up into a world of seemingly unanswered prayer and no miracles. Or maybe what theologian Jordan Peele says: bad miracle. And what caused me so much death anxiety and spiritual disorientation was that I found that there was no discernable correlation between choice and outcome, at least it didn’t seem so. I was seeing my patients, their futures, fall mid-flight, and I was vicariously absorbing intrapsychic grief, the pain of losing what can never be. So what could I say as a chaplain to my patient who lost hope, who felt abandoned, who was living a phantom life, not their own, especially when my own faith was so challenged? Because before, I had a box that I could use, a box of faith, and I could just cover them with it. And I could say, “God won’t give you more than you can handle. Everything happens for a reason. Huh, I don’t know the reasons, but you know, reasons. God’s going to turn your mess into a message, your test into a testimony, your trial into a triumph.” But as I kept saying those things, I felt like a freestyler suddenly losing confidence. You started so strong. I realized that my theology was just rushing my patient past their pain to a distant promised land. I was pulling an eschatological curtain of hope that was far away and smothering their present suffering. And I realized that it wasn’t just sugarcoating; it was a sugar straightjacket.
All this came to a head when, on my assigned floor, room 5116, K, one of my best friends and colleagues, John, showed up. Terrible accident, wrong place at the wrong time. He was there for five days before he died. And to see John that way, intubated, under a tangle of tubes, it was such a juxtaposition to how John was in life. He was so joyous and energetic and vibrant, taking these long strides down the hallway. And when I would see him in the hall, a hello would turn into 45 minutes. And sometimes, if I saw him in the hall before he saw me, I would duck into another hallway. But what I wouldn’t give for one more minute with him in the hall. John’s death shook me because it seemed so random. I was shaken by the unfairness of his loss, and my thread dissolved like a wax thread over fire. I concluded, seeing so much suffering, that none of us are safe. I lost faith. I lost hope.
Now, I wish I could tell you that what brought me back was some grand epiphany, some sudden realization. But what did begin to give me some grounding was something very unexpected. It was two inches of space on a piece of paper that I kept seeing over and over again. And it was these two inches of space that I saw repeatedly filled in again and again that began to build for me the shape of a new box.
As a chaplain at the hospital where I work, we assist with a document that we learned about today called Advance Directives. Half of it regards a healthcare surrogate, and the other half regards a document called the Living Will. A Living Will, essentially, is an expression of your wishes of what you would want to happen if you were to ever end up on life support, life-prolonging measures. And the document that we have in the hospital where I work, at the very bottom, there are these two inches of space. And in these two inches of space, there are several lines, and those lines are labeled “Other Instructions.” Other instructions. Now, patients don’t always fill that up, but some do. And in nine years, having done hundreds of Advance Directives with patients, I saw a repeated pattern in these two inches of space that began to rebuild the shape of a box for me. One patient wrote, “Let my dog see me to say goodbye.” Another said, “Bring all my blankets and utensils.” Another wrote, “Keep all my pictures of my family around me.” And another wrote, “Keep putting chapstick on my lips.” And the reason she wrote that is because she said, when she kissed her own dying mother goodbye, that her lips were so dry and so chapped, that when her own children were going to kiss her goodbye, she wanted to make sure that they would remember what it was like when they were kids.
What I saw in my patients’ Living Wills, in their “Other Instructions,” what I saw was them making a very, very small choice within an inevitable outcome to become their own safety. It was as if they were finding a shaft of light through concrete, a sliver of sunbeam breaking through their box.
A chaplain that I used to work with, Chaplain Amy, she was a palliative chaplain, she would ask this question of families who are making the impossible decision from full-code resuscitation measures to comfort measures only. She would ask this question of families. She would say, “How can we relocate our hope?” That means, if we can’t save a life, how do we bring life? What I was seeing within these two inches of space, repeated over and over, was that even when the outcome is inevitable, even when there are no choices left, it doesn’t mean that dignity has to die. And I saw continually how death was both defied and dignified. I needed my faith, my box, to get bigger, to be able to accommodate a world of no formulas, of other instructions. What does it mean for our boxes of faith, race, gender, religion, to be reconstructed with other instructions?
Relocating hope also means that I had to redefine “miracle.” I, for example, conduct the next-of-kin search, and I find a guy who knows a guy, and I locate an estranged son who gets to see his mother at her deathbed and kiss her goodbye. Or I hold the hand of a man who wanted to be a musician his whole life. He had to choose another way, but at the end, he finally gets to sing, and his final breath is a song. Or a baby is born but doesn’t make it, but their family decides to do their cultural naming ritual anyway, and it’s beautiful. And this is how they choose to grieve, to name their dream.
Every one of us in this room has a box, a bias about what we believe is best, and we can’t entirely get rid of the box. But I have learned to have an ever-shifting box. I went from a rigid square to an oblong hexagon to Schrödinger’s trapezoid. To be a chaplain in a room with so much suffering and grief, what I was experiencing was a constant, ongoing demolition of definitions and a renovation of my heart, making bigger and bigger room for everything that I was seeing and experiencing. And I think I’ve come to discover that my death anxiety, seeing and hearing the dead, maybe in some way, that was a gift. Because instead of letting go of the dead, I have learned that grief is letting them in. That I don’t have to move on from loss, but I can move with. And though my friend John may literally be in a box, it doesn’t mean that his memory and his joy has to be. And I can still talk to him in the hallway.
So, I ask you, as I’ve asked myself, how can we make our box bigger, to make choices in a choiceless room, to find the non-ideal ideal? And if we can’t find safety in an outcome, how do we find safety in an outstretched hand to one another? Thank you. [Applause] [Music]
