At the beginning of everyday at the hospital, the group of
us chaplains (there are two staff chaplains, 2 resident chaplains, and 3 summer
interns) must complete morning work.
Enter the Broadway
soundtrack of Lion King with “The
Morning Report.” It always comes to my mind.
Morning work is a main administrative task which informs us
about who is here, who we connected with previously, and who might want to see
us today. Each one of us visits the patients on a unit (eg. ICU, Labor and
Delivery, Emergency Room, Surgical) to offer comfort and care as desired. We
also provide information about Advance Directives, prayer, and coloring books
for the bored. While the morning work is semi-complicated and takes one
person about 30 minutes to comb through the 60+ names on average, it is the
guide for the rest of the day.
That is, it is a potential guide.
Twice in the last week the morning work went unused, by the
way side. The priority of caring for a family and friends while a patient
is actively dying trumps any other plan for the day. This time with families
and a patient is sweet, tortuous, calm, and wrenching all at the same time.
Logistics have to be tended to while the chaplain also cares for and supports
the grieving people left behind to live. Such connections are not
complete in a typical 30-minute visit, but can instead fill an entire
afternoon.
This past Friday, only three of us were at work and I
scrambled all morning to take care of the admin pieces. I made sure morning
work was wrapped up before a meeting only after to run right to ICU for rounds
to find out about each patient to report back and complete the morning work
information. Then after a service celebrating the Feast of St. Anthony (patron
saint of St. Anthony North Hospital), a quick bite for lunch and a single
conversation with one of the patients on my unit, I got a page to attend to a
family and their dying mother/grandmother. All the scurrying and preparation of
the morning felt for not as I spent the next five hours with the family and
dying patient.
When I pray in the morning for the day, I sometimes get
tongue tied, because as much as I can anticipate what the day will look like, I
really have no idea. But maybe it is in that tongue-tied, speechless
moment that the vital prayer exists: Let
me be present to you, God, and present to your people. These are the most
important aspects. The preparation for visits and efforts to provide
intentional care are not to be thrown out. But a clingy-spirit to such things
must be; in the end we are only allowed and able to cling to sacred space where
God needs us most.
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