My most moving hospital visit took place during a cold, dreary Holy Week several years ago. One of our cats was dying at home, and I was tired and sad and generally in an awful mood. I went to the hospital anyway, wondering if it was the right thing to do. I got my answer about halfway into the shift. Things had been quiet until then; very few of the people I visited requested prayer or even conversation. But then I knocked on the closed door of a room and heard, “Come in!”
As I walked into the room, I introduced myself. “My name’s Susan. I'm a volunteer chaplain.” To my chagrin, the patient, an emaciated man of indeterminate age, started crying. “Don't be scared!” I told him. “I visit everybody here.” A lot of patients still believe that chaplains only visit the dying, which can cause considerable alarm to someone with, say, a sprained ankle.
The patient shook his head, reaching for my hand. “No, no, it’s not that. I'm dying of AIDS, and fifteen minutes ago I was lying here crying, praying to God to send me a sign that he still loved me. And then you walked in. You're a sign from God.”
That happened a long time ago, but even now, when I'm feeling inept at or insecure about my hospital work, I use this visit to reassure myself. The work isn't about me: it’s about the patient and the patient’s relationship to the divine. My job, both small and terrifying huge, is to be the intermediary in that relationship. But sometimes I don't have to say a word. Sometimes, I can help patients feel closer to God just by showing up, just by showing them that someone cares enough to come to their bedside.
The word “angel” means messenger. Although I hardly consider myself a conventionally angelic person – I have a temper and I'm notoriously stubborn – there have been several times in my life when I've become aware that God was using me as a messenger (usually without my knowledge, and sometimes against my will). This visit was one of those times.
Being an angel in that situation was easy: all I had to do was show up. The process can sometimes be much messier. AIDS patients, even now, are often starved for human contact, both physical and emotional. In the early nineties, when my husband Gary and I weren't yet married, we had a friend and neighbor named Michael who had AIDS. He also had the world’s most impossible personality. He told us every detail of his life; he wanted every detail of ours. He pounded on our door in the middle of the night when he was in pain. He pounded on our door first thing in the morning, even when he wasn't in pain, to raid our refrigerator for breakfast.
When Gary and I got engaged, Michael complained that Gary should have gotten me a flashier ring. When Michael was in the hospital, he called to demand that I bring him Godiva chocolates. “You can't say no,” he told me. “I'm dying of AIDS.”
But he also gave us gifts and left messages on our answering machine to tell us how much he loved us. He cheered me on through the process of getting my Ph.D. He insisted on paying for a limousine to take me and Gary to our wedding, and he asked if he could give a toast at the reception. He was too sick to give it; he had to go home. But he had a friend read it for him, and it was beautiful.
He could be wonderful. He could be horrible. You never knew which side he'd show. He begged us to take him to parties, because he was lonely. But if we did take him along, he often did something totally unacceptable. Because his illness left him so little privacy, he seemed to believe that he had a perfect right to invade other people’s. Once, at a party given by Gary’s boss, Michael searched the hostess’s medicine cabinet and gleefully told me and Gary -- and the other people standing near us -- what medical conditions SHE had. Michael and I had quite an argument after that little incident.
“Michael,” I told him, “if you keep acting like this, you won't get a chance to die of AIDS, because somebody’s going to kill you first!” See what I mean about how I'm not an angel?
Gary and I loved Michael. I think Gary and I served the same role for him that I served for the hospital patient with AIDS. We helped Michael reconnect with the world. We helped him feel like he was part of life again, until, too soon, his time came to die.
