A Nighttime Friend and a Daytime Usher: Life As a Hospital Chaplain

The emergency room witching hour (cry warning)

The wedding of Laurel and Bear at Bluewater Farm, in Andover, NH on 7/12/14.

When you are a hospital chaplain awoken by a page in the middle of the night, the news tends not to be good. Occasionally, a new nurse will call you with an innocuous request, “317 window would like a Quaran,” and you tell her, kindly, that non-urgent requests for spiritual care will be answered in the morning. But tonight, when you answer a witching hour page, tragedy is on the other end.

You hang up the phone, crawl out of the on-call bed and slip your dress over your head. You realize you are not breathing, and you remind yourself to inhale.

En route to the emergency room, you pass a night-shift custodian and an orthopedic surgeon. Both greet you with bleary eyes and nods that say, “We’re in this together.” Come morning, hospital hierarchies will resume and you will find yourself somewhere between these two on the ubiquitous pecking order. But, for now, you’re all just weary colleagues.

On the phone, the charge nurse had described a scenario so horrific that you could not wrap your mind around it. But when you arrive in the emergency room, it becomes real. There has been an accident, and young children have been killed. Nothing is more tragic.

Your task is to comfort the only survivor, who is four years old.

You draw the curtain to B17 and find medical staff examining the girl for injuries. She looks up expectantly as you enter. You introduce yourself and, by way of explanation, say, “I’m here to keep you company.” She is remarkably, miraculously intact. She smiles, which surprises you. “Hi,” she says. The attending physician finds only a small abrasion on the girl’s elbow, and then he leaves for the trauma bay, where the girl’s siblings are dying.

A nurse checks the child’s vital signs and then she, too, leaves suddenly. You are alone with the girl and the knowledge that she does not yet realize that nothing will ever be the same. You want to freeze this moment for her and stretch it out to blanket her whole life.

“What’s your name?” you ask her.

“Alice,” she says.

“That’s a beautiful name.”

“Thanks.” She looks tired, and you drape a blanket over her, willing her to fall asleep. Compliantly, she draws it to her chin. She is silent for a moment, and then she says, “Where’s my mom?”

Tomorrow, the girl’s grandfather will be the one to tell her that her mother and siblings have died. This moment will become her earliest memory and constant companion. Now, in the middle of the night, you say only, “She’s not here, honey.”

“Okay,” Alice says.

“Would you like me to read you a story?” you ask, and her face lights up. You enlist an emergency room technician to sit with her until you return, armed with the one children’s book you keep in your office.

“You came back,” Alice says. She makes her way to the edge of the stretcher, which dwarfs her tiny body, and folds her arms over the rail.

You open the book and lean in to show her the pictures.

“In the great green room, there was a telephone, and red balloon.”

She rests her chin on her hands.

“Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.”

You put your hand on the rail, and she reaches out to take it.

“Goodnight stars, goodnight air.”

She falls asleep just before

“Goodnight noises everywhere.”

You’re not sure when, exactly, the next day begins. You’re still with her when the sun rises, when her grandfather comes, when her second life starts.

Featured Sponsored Content

Please read our comment policy before you comment.

The APW Store is Here

APW Wedding e-shop

go find all our favorites from around the internet, and our free planning tools

Shop Now
APW Wedding e-shop

Planning a wedding?

We have all the planning tools you need right now.

Budget spreadsheets, checklists, and more...

Get Your Free Planning Tools