The Death Note

I turn 27 today.  At 4:03 pm Central Standard Time in 1986, I was born via cesarean section after refusing to cooperate and come out headfirst like a normal kid.

Late last night, close to the stroke of midnight central time when it would become my birthday where I was born (as opposed to where I live now, on the West Coast), I was driving home from a hospice center where the father of a congregant passed away after a long, losing battle with cancer.

So just as I'm celebrating my life today, members of my church family are mourning the loss of another life.  And I mourn as well.

Perhaps on another day in another year, it might cause me to simply listen to The Lion King's "Circle of Life" on repeat.  But not today.

I was asked by the hospice nurse to fill out a spiritual care form to document my ministry with the family over the past few days.  At the bottom of the page was a box to check whether the patient had passed away.

I hesitated for a second before marking off that box.

In that moment's hesitation, a flood of memories came back of my stint as a chaplaincy intern in California Pacific Medical Center's Clinical Pastoral Education program in San Francisco.

There, I had to document in a patient's chart log any pastoral care I gave--including at times of death.

You haven't lived until you have tried to sum up another person's dying in a paragraph of clinically dry language.

The writing of those death notes was one of the emptiest experiences I have ever had in ministry.  Sitting down amid the hustle and bustle of a nurse's station, I'd have to tune out everything else around me to try to summon the will to describe my work at another person's death.

And after the anger I've struggled with lately over things far outside my control (see also: my immediate previous entry), I have to admit that those memories flooding back to me acted as a pretty strong and necessary hip check.

Dying is part of the involuntary bargain we made in being born, the involuntary bargain that gives us the greatest possible gift with the greatest possible cost of eventually losing it.

Here's to hoping and praying and knowing, on a day when I am looking back on my own life, that there is still more life that awaits us all on the other side.

Yours in Christ,
Eric