Intimate Strangers: The Role of the Hospital Chaplain in Situations of Sudden Traumatic Loss

Abstract

Discusses the role of the hospital chaplain in situations of sudden traumatic loss making extensive use of the metaphore of the Stranger. Explicates biblical, theological, historical, and psychological perspectives on the metaphore as it appears within the Judeo-Christian tradition and critically relates this to much current crisis literature. Notes how hospital traumas demonstrate to the chaplain how God's presence may be witnessed in the strange and in ways not always placid or traditional. An eighteen-year-old high school senior, whose mother was a cancer patient only days away from death in a distant urban hospital, was at home alone with his father when the father began complaining of chest pains. He asked his son to drive him to the local emergency hospital, about twenty minutes away. The young man wisely refused, instead insisting on calling an ambulance. En route to the hospital, the father suffered a severe heart attack. When the ambulance arrived at the emergency room, the father, only hours before a vigorous and robust man, now was teetering critically on the edge of life and death. As a chaplain in the hospital, I was called by a nurse to wait with the son. I found him with tears streaming down his face, his hands visibly shaking. While he had begun to prepare himself for his mother's pending death, the sudden possibility of at once losing both parents terrified and overwhelmed him. The young man's only sister—a college student—lived in a city hours away, as did any of the nearest relatives of the family. He could think of no family friends who could be asked to support him there. His parish priest was out of town. The tension-filled five or six hours we waited together for relatives to arrive, during which the father experienced two more heart attacks, were among the most agonizing moments I have had in ministry.