Saturday I was on-call at the hospital, which means that I was on duty for the entire hospital for the day, reporting at 8:00am. On these on-call days, my job is to be available for any calls in the hospital requesting a chaplain, and visiting my own particular floors during the down time. Being the day after July 4, I was expecting a slow day. The afternoon was slow, but shortly after I arrived (8:10), I got a call from a family in the lobby requesting me to take them to the morgue to visit the lady's deceased father. Her father passed away from a rapid-growing cancer the day before and she was not able to make it out here from the East Coast to see him before he passed away, so she wanted to see him in the morgue to say "goodbye" as part of her grieving process. Before going to the family (which included the daughter, her husband, and the deceased man's brother), I contacted the House Supervisor and she told me to talk with the family and recommend not going to the morgue because the body was in unpresentable condition. He passed the day before, his eyes were harvested (organ donor), and there was bodily fluid still on the body (sorry for the details...it helps me process). In other words, the body had not been cleaned and prepared for viewing yet. He was in a bag in a refrigerated compartment. So I spoke with the family and explained the situation and they still wanted to go and say goodbye. Before I took them down (the morgue is in the basement), the House Supervisor and I went and called the lift team to get the body out and place him on a bed-of-sorts in the morgue. There was a lot of anxiety as we waited for the lift team to arrive, wondering how I would physically respond to the sight of someone in a potentially horrific state. We proceeded to unzip the bag and clean him off with towels and close his eyelids and mouth, and place a towel over the top of his head and blanket over his body. To my surprise, I handled this preparation just fine, with no real shock or nausea (though I wonder if it will hit me later when I least expect it). There wasn't much of a smell because the body had been kept cool at 36 degrees. His skin was a yellow-ish color.
So I brought the family down and the man's daughter burst into tears immediately. We were in there for nearly two hours together. I had nothing to say to her, but to communicate God's presence with her and her father through my presence with her. I offered her lots of tissue. I sat mostly in silence for those long minutes, and let her cry and grieve. She told me stories that made us both laugh. She sang to her father. She took the towel off of his head and stroked his hair with her hand. She held his foot and his hand. I stood in silence. Her uncle, the deceased man's brother, wouldn't go in. He said he wanted to keep the happy images of their childhood together in his mind, not the image of his body after death. He waited outside and shed no tears. He went to the cafeteria and got water for her.
After she was finished there, she wanted me to take them to the room he was in before he passed so she could see the room and thank the nursing staff. We went up to the ICU and when we walked into the room, the deceased man's brother, who kept himself away from tears, said, "I had a vision of him in this room." And then he broke down and sobbed. I was relieved to see that because I thought he needed to cry and my hunch was that it was going to hit him unexpectedly (or at least that was my hope for him).
We are learning to deal with death this summer in CPE. It is something that my culture has taught me to avoid. I don't want to avoid it. I want to learn to accept it, both in my own personal experience and also as I care for others. Sometimes the most difficult situations for me in the hospital are the most significant. This was one of those moments. To watch this family accept the loss and grieve together was very healing for them, and it was a blessing for me to be with them during that time. God was there. I can testify.
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