Here are two more questions I answered in my “Ask the Chaplain” series of reels.
Question: Has your own understanding of faith or spirituality changed since doing this work?
Absolutely.
The change could possibly be attributed to normal modifying of the beliefs I held in my twenties. I was 35 when I started being with the dying. So probably by my 50s I really saw the more profound changes in my beliefs. Richard Rohr writes about the two halves of life, and I made the changes right on time. The changes in my beliefs was a combination of what I was reading, my work with the dying, and just processing life from the viewpoint having lived through my 50s and 60s.
The book that did the most for this change was Kathleen Sighn’s “The Grace in Dying: How we are transformed spiritually as we die” (1998) [it has a new subtitle now]. The short version of what she described, and what I saw in my patients, was a gradual letting go of the idea of a substantial self. We spend most of our life creating a strong self-image, only to find, in the end, it is an illusion. Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death” (1973) says the same thing. I am fully in the camp with those who believe that there is no self. My dying patients helped me see that in real time.
Question: Is there a moment or encounter that stays with you even now?
No question it was the events around the moment of death of 22-year-old Scott. He was dying in the in-patient unit, and his chaplain was going off on vacation. The chaplain called me to ask if I could cover for him since he had put together that we were acquainted. Indeed, we were. I and my family lived just a couple of doors down from Scott. His older sisters babysat our kids. I was Scott’s cub scout leader.
He now lay dying. His body had wasted, devastated by the cancer. On my second visit I could tell by his breathing he was moments from death. I stood at the foot of the bed, his mother was on one side and his sisters on the other. He mercifully breathed his last. His mother and sisters, of course, wept. With their permission I offered a prayer.
Michelangelo’s Pietà (Wikimedia Commons)
Then, something extraordinary happened. The nurse asked Scott’s mother, “Would you like to hold him?” “Yes.” The nurse gathered the sheets around his body, lifted him, and placed her lifeless son in her lap. She held him as if he were once again a small child. Now, I was weeping.
I told a friend this story and he said the image reminded him of Michaelangelo’s “Pietà.” Indeed, Mary knew what it was like to lose a son.
__________________
Author Chaplain Hank Dunn, MDiv, has sold over 4 million copies of his books Hard Choices for Loving People and Light in the Shadows (also available on Amazon).
