You know, I’m not afraid to die,” Louise whispered as I read a psalm to her. I put the book down.
“You’re not?”
“No. I never have been. That’s not what it is.”
I waited. I could tell something was coming, because Louise had never talked like this before.
Our previous visits had been what I would call “faith sharing,” for lack of a better term. Louise had been born to Italian immigrant parents and raised Catholic, and she and her husband, now dead some thirty years, had raised their seven children Catholic. Louise lived with her son Ed, who was now the pastor of a nondenominational evangelical church, and her doting daughter-in-law Irene. One of them was usually there when I visited, and I’d listen to them talk about their faith and what it meant to them. Then they’d sing hymns, and Louise would always join in, and she’d smile when they read her favorite passages from the Bible. If Louise was feeling up to it, she might talk a little bit about the years when her children were small. Ed would chime in about the trouble he and his brothers used to get into. Then there would be more hymn singing, more talking about how very good God is, speculation about what Heaven would be like. The tone was always unremittingly cheerful.
This time, it was just Louise and me. She’d asked for her favorite psalm.
After a minute, she let out a deep, shuddering sigh and just the hint of a moan.
“Do you want—” I began, but she cut me off.
“My children aren’t saved. Five of them aren’t saved. It’s all I pray about. I can’t die until I know they’re saved. I can’t leave them. They aren’t saved. Do you understand?”
I did, because I had heard this before. I had seen this pain before, from a dozen other parents.
Louise was referring to the particular evangelical Christian belief about needing to be “born again” in order to be saved and therefore gain entrance to Heaven after death.
If you don’t share this belief, or aren’t familiar with it, put yourself, if you can, in Louise’s place for a moment. You’re dying, and you believe you’re saved—that you are going to Heaven and you are going to meet Jesus, whom you love with all your heart. But some of your children are not going to Heaven, at least as of now. You love these children with all your heart, too. You carried them in your body and nursed them with your breasts and washed their little bodies and put Band-Aids on their knees and cooked them dinner every night for almost twenty years. You cried with them when they were rejected by friends and felt your heart leap when they hit their first home run and picked out their voice in the chorus concert. You watched them grow and felt your love for them expand. You love them still as they go through, and sometimes struggle with, life. You love them more than your own life, and maybe, secretly, even more than you love Jesus. You are told that this is how God the Father loves you. Like a parent. When you doubt God’s love, you remember that God loves you like a mother or father, like you love your own children.
But you also believe that this God will let your babies suffer forever. You believe they will go to Hell because they are not saved. You have done all you can to help these children get saved, and they aren’t interested. They have their own faiths, or no faith at all. You’re dying, and in your belief system, when you die you’ll never see them again. Not only will they be lost to you forever, but they will suffer. That makes God a monster, and parenting monstrous, and love a lie.
But you cannot admit this. You cannot admit that this belief, the bedrock of your faith—and for someone like Louise, of your social and familial world—is shaking you to your core. Except to the chaplain, when your children aren’t in the room.
If I were Louise, I wouldn’t want to die, either.
There were so many times, when talking to people like her, that I wanted to shout, “That’s only one interpretation among many within Christianity! This is not the only way, or even the most common or oldest way, to understand salvation! There are other ways, different ways, to answer these questions!”
But that’s not what a chaplain does. A chaplain isn’t there to convince you to change your faith. She isn’t there to give a history or theology lesson. She isn’t there to convince you to believe what she believes.
A chaplain is there to help you figure out what you believe, what gives you comfort, the meaning of your life, who God is to you. Not to her.
So I learned to bite my lip and to ask, “What was it like? The day you were saved?” I learned to ask that question from another patient.
• • •
ELEANOR WAS a tiny woman, not more than five feet tall and less than a hundred pounds. She was dying of rectal cancer, which was embarrassing and humiliating for her. She was very social by nature, and proud, and she had loved flirting with men and talking with her friends. But now she was so terrified of the possibility of having an accident that she stayed close to her bathroom, taking all her meals in her bedroom in her assisted-living facility.
Her room was dominated by a queen-size bed with a flowered comforter that she had brought from home, and that seemed to swallow her up whenever I saw her lying in it, which was more and more the case as time went on. But usually she sat in her light blue recliner, next to a clear Rubbermaid storage chest stuffed full of yarn that she was no longer able to knit because her fingers were too arthritic. The shade was always drawn on the one window in her room because she couldn’t see the television when the shade was up and it was too difficult for her to raise and lower it by herself in the middle of the day.
Eleanor had outlived three husbands. She had no children. Her toenails caused her enormous pain, and her dentures clattered in her shrunken mouth. She was so angry to still be alive.
You learn working in hospice that a person can, in fact, live too long.
Once, after I knocked on the door and said hello, she waved her hand dismissively, looked away, and said with bitterness, “I know who you are, so just say your bit and go.” Usually, though, she smiled when I knocked and asked me to come in and talk, and offered me her uneaten lunch tray.
She talked mostly about her late husbands, her sister, and the beauty of her farm. She was a lifelong Southern Baptist, she said, but she didn’t talk about her faith or her spiritual life, even when I prompted her, and only ever mentioned her church to say angrily that they no longer visited her. She didn’t have a favorite verse from Scripture, unlike almost every other Baptist I’ve known. To be honest, I was never sure that she really wanted my visits, or if she was just politely putting up with me, as well-reared Southern women do. But one day, in the midst of talking about I don’t remember what, she mentioned the day she was saved.
I asked her to tell me more about it.
“Tell you about what?”
“What happened when you were saved. What did it feel like? How did you know it had happened?”
“I can close my eyes and feel it again,” she said. Her body, which she always held tensely—arms pinned to her lap, legs together, stooped forward in the chair instead of leaning back—relaxed into the recliner. The grimace and forehead furrows melted. “I was at a revival meeting. Lots of people were going up to the front of the tent and being saved. I’d seen it happen before, the preacher putting out the call. But I never felt like I wanted to go up there. That day seemed no different. But then. Then. I never really understood what happened, but when I walked out of that tent, suddenly the leaves were so green on the trees. I don’t know how I had never noticed that green before. It was like the color on the whole world was turned up. I could see every single blade of grass. I could hear every bird sing. I could feel each ray of the sun on my skin. And I knew it right then, that Jesus loved me and died for me and I was saved because he loved me so much. I knew he was the Lord. Everything was so beautiful, so alive. The whole world had changed. I didn’t know how I hadn’t seen it before. Everything changed because I was saved. Or maybe I was saved because everything changed.”
• • •
IT INSTANTLY BECAME my favorite question to ask of my evangelical patients: What was it like, the day you were saved? Every single one of them had almost the same story. Everything looked different and sounded different, even the air felt different. The world was made anew for them. “I couldn’t believe how alive the world was. And I had never noticed before.” Truly, they felt born again, not just in their faith but in the world itself. They experienced a new creation.
Just asking them to remember and relive that day—to close their eyes and see what they saw, smell what they smelled, hear what they heard—could bring even the most despondent patient joy.
I’d ask them what remembering that day told them about God. Sometimes, pondering that question would bring about a new understanding of their current situation. Sometimes it would make their current spiritual questions even more puzzling.
Always, however, they were left in wonder at how nothing in the physical world had changed but their own perception of it. That was enough to change everything. Always, I was left in wonder that such a massive shift could happen in less than a second. It seems miraculous.
• • •
FOR MANY YEARS, I wanted change. At the same time, I despised the changes that I felt had been forced on me by that fateful surgery.
I wanted to change what had happened when my first baby was born so badly, I could taste it. For a long time I was convinced I’d brought it on myself, by eating too much ice cream. I was ten days overdue when he was born. Every night after his due date my husband and I had driven out into the Iowa countryside to a little shop that sold homemade ice cream. I loved those drives in the June dusk through the knee-high corn, zigzagging against the hills and the lightning bugs just beginning to blink. I can close my eyes and still taste the ice cream melting in my mouth while we watched our enormous baby’s arms and legs bulge out through my belly when he moved, like a scene from Alien. Was it the ice cream that made him grow so big—so big he got stuck in the birth canal, leading to the C-section, leading to the failure of the epidural, leading to the ketamine, leading to the psychosis? If I had just not eaten that ice cream, could I have made it all not happen? Had I just been too happy?
In my mind, I used to go through every second of the days and hours that led up to his birth, trying to understand what I could have changed to fix it all, to avoid the fear and terror that raced through my body and head every waking moment, to get back those lost years.
I wanted the chance to do it again, to be a new mother again, to drink in his baby smell and kiss his baby head and actually remember it.
I wanted my memories, the memories lost to post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociation. The only way I could seem to cope with this overwhelming longing was by perseverating about what I could have changed.
When I listened to my evangelical patients’ day-I-was-saved stories, I understood in a visceral way the connection between change and salvation. It seemed that change was the only thing that could save me from the pain I was in.
• • •
SARAH, ANOTHER WOMAN living in an assisted-living facility, wanted change, too. Sarah was as aloof and reserved as Eleanor was angry. She loved the Rosary, a repetitive and meditative prayer that often leads to a deep state of contemplation, and we always said several decades of the Rosary together. She barely spoke, however, during our first few meetings, and would only glance at me fleetingly before looking out the window at the fountain in the garden just outside her rooms. She always asked me to return, though, so I did. Slowly, over the course of several visits, she began to open up just a little.
Sarah never joined in on any of the activities the facility sponsored, staying in her room all day instead. That, of course, was her right. All of us—the hospice team and her children—thought that it was also her desire.
Until one day I showed up at her apartment with a string of fat beads around my neck.
“I like your necklace,” she said shyly.
The facility was hosting a Mardi Gras party in the dining room, and the activities director had bedecked me as I passed through, I explained.
“I heard it,” she replied. “I wish I had gone.”
I jumped up from my seat and told her it was still going on. I offered to wheel her down the long hall to the party.
“Oh no,” she said, and her hands flew up to her face. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t know what to do, or what to say. I would just be so embarrassed. Oh, no. No. No.”
I sat back down, asked if she was sure. Yes, she was sure. She was just too shy to go, she explained.
“I often wonder,” she said haltingly, “what it would be like to have friends and go to parties and be part of it all. I wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t been so shy all the time.”
Over the next few visits, it became very clear that Sarah was not aloof and reserved. She wasn’t choosing not to participate and socialize. In fact, she desperately wanted to be a part of the bingo games and craft classes, and she longed to go on the mystery bus trips and to holiday parties. She just felt too shy to do so.
She would sometimes see the exuberant activities director leading a conga line of dancers down the hallway and pray that they would stop in front of her door and ask her to come out and join them. But the conga line never made it that far.
She always left her door wide open and sat directly in front of it in hopes that someone would walk by and say hello, and that perhaps they could become friends that way. But that never happened.
Sarah’s room was in the worst spot possible in the entire facility for that sort of interaction. Hers was the last apartment at the end of a very long hallway branching off from the main living room. So while she could see all the fun, no one ever walked past her door.
When I shared Sarah’s predicament at our hospice team meeting, we hatched a plan. We’d set up several volunteers to come visit Sarah every week. Together, they could go to whatever activity was going on at the time, so Sarah wouldn’t have to brave the living room alone. The social worker would work with her on conversation skills. Beth, the RN case manager, would advocate to have Sarah moved into a new apartment, one that was closer to the center of activity where she could feel like she was a part of things.
Sarah’s children supported the plan, and Sarah herself was excited and apprehensively looking forward to the changes. The first were easy to put into place. The volunteer coordinator sent over three of her best, most skilled volunteers that week. The social worker started visiting weekly.
The move, however, was going to take some time and doing. Sarah had to wait until someone in a more centrally located apartment moved out. Beth had to convince the facility’s administration that this was a necessary move. After a couple of months, the day arrived. An apartment just two doors down from the dining room, right in the center of all the excitement, was hers.
But Sarah refused to move.
I visited her a few days later and asked what had happened.
While the new apartment would have placed her right in the middle of the building, she explained, it meant giving up her view of the garden and fountain. The garden she watched all winter, waiting for the barest trace of green in March, and all spring as the bulbs burst from the ground and the crabapple tree erupted into pink blossoms, and all summer as the roses bloomed, and all fall as the leaves on the hickory tree just beyond the garden turned the sky to electric yellow. The fountain she had been contemplating every day for the five years she had lived there, as she said her Rosary.
She wanted a change, but she would have to give all that up to get it. No other apartment in the facility had that view. She was faced with a dilemma: the quiet contemplation she had known all her life, or the excitement and friendship she had craved for just as long.
Was it that she was afraid of changing? I asked.
She looked out the window and played with the rosary beads in her lap. No, that was not it.
A few days before Sarah had been set to change apartments, she saw her mother at the foot of her bed. She saw her there frequently lately, but this time her mother was standing with a young woman whom she didn’t know. They were holding hands. They were smiling at Sarah and nodding. She didn’t know what it meant.
The day before she was supposed to move, her daughter had come to help her pack up. They began to look through one of her old albums, where they came across a very old photograph.
“That’s when I recognized the strange woman. It was my birth mother.”
“Your birth mother?”
“Yes. She had died in childbirth when I was born. I never met her. My father remarried when I was two, and it was my stepmother who raised me. She was the only mother I knew. But I have one photograph of my birth mother in her wedding gown. When I saw the picture I realized the stranger was my birth mother. She and my mother were holding hands at the foot of my bed.
“I suddenly realized that I have been this way since I was born. I have been shy every day of my life. They were telling me it was okay. That I didn’t have to be ashamed of never fitting in, of always being on the edge of things. That they loved me just the way I am.
“I like going to bingo with the volunteers, but I can’t give up my garden. It’s who I am, who I’ve always been. I don’t need to change that.”
• • •
SARAH’S CHOICE was not to change. Instead, she let go of the regret for her nature that she had been carrying around. She let go of the regret for a life she didn’t lead and embraced the one she had. She made small changes that made her happy now, but she didn’t need to change her past.
I had been focused on changing my past, but it doesn’t work that way, of course. No one can go back in time to change what happened, unless you’re Marty McFly or Doctor Who, and it didn’t always go so well for them, either. You cannot change your past, and you cannot change yourself in the past.
I couldn’t change any piece of what happened. All I could change was how I saw it.
The radical, joyful, healing change my born-again patients experienced was not a change of circumstance or past experiences. It was a change of vision. A change of insight, of understanding who they really were—a person so beloved by God that they were saved, not by what they did but simply because they were. The world was not born anew, but the way they saw it was. The leaves had always been green; they just had never noticed how beautiful green is. Countless rays of sunshine had landed on their skin all their lives; they had just never felt what was always there.
Was it the awareness of a world so alive that made them realize they were loved? Or was it the awareness that they were loved that made the world born again? It was always a bit of chicken-and-egg when they tried to puzzle it out.
And yet their radical new understanding hadn’t prevented further pain from entering my patients’ lives, even after they’d been saved. It didn’t prevent Louise’s intense crisis of faith over the unsaved children she feared she wouldn’t see again, provoked by a God she believed had loved her enough to save her. It didn’t prevent Eleanor from feeling abandoned by everyone who had ever loved her, including God, as she hobbled alone from recliner to toilet and back again, one hundred times a day.
Even the kind of momentous change in perspective that my patients believed was enough to save them for eternity on the day they were saved wasn’t enough change to get them through life on earth. More change,ongoing change, is required of us all, it seems, as long as we’re alive, even if we’ve been saved, even if we already know that we are lovable.
I’m not a theologian, or a preacher, or a priest. I cannot comment on and do not pretend to be able to tease out the intricacies of soteriology—the theories of salvation. But I do know that, on this human plane, the knot of change, salvation, and love cannot be untangled.
If you want to be saved from your present suffering, you must be willing to change and be changed in the present.
That change can be tangible—leaving an abusive relationship, going back to school, moving down the hallway in an assisted-living facility.
But it can also be a change in perception. This, in fact, is the harder change.
A change of perception to knowing you are enough, and have been since birth, to seeing a world suffused in love and swimming in beauty, despite loneliness, despite pain, despite illness, loss, trauma, and even atrocity—now that’s hard. That seems impossible. Yet it happens, again and again, and again.