On the morning of September 10, 2001, I walked in to my office, excited about starting a new job as a chaplain educator at Washington Hospital Center. My staff of fifteen chaplains was diverse: a Jesuit priest, a Pentecostal woman, a Methodist woman, an imam, an African American Adventist, and a Dominican brother. Little did I know that soon I would be swept up into a new career, working as a spiritual care specialist for disaster situations.
After the plane hit the Pentagon the next morning, Washington Hospital Center began discharging any patients they could, expecting hundreds of victims to be admitted. In the end, only fifteen people were brought in to the burn unit. The realization that there were no more patients, no more survivors, was devastating to all. It was my job as a hospital chaplain to provide spiritual and emotional comfort, not only for the victims, their families, and loved ones, but also for the doctors and nurses, the front office staff, and janitors. Everyone was struggling to comprehend the events of the day. What was there to say? How could I provide hope and solace to patients, colleagues, and friends?
The World Trade Center fell on my classroom on September 11, and eight years later I stood before 4,000 attendees at the National Disaster Medical System in Nashville and urged for the inclusion of disaster-trained professional chaplains to help the health and mental health capacity for mass fatality disasters as a national spokesman for the Red Cross. There were so many who had already brought such comfort to those impacted by disasters.
As devastating as this was, comforting those facing tragedy was not a new role for me. My passion for caring for others had started many years before at Yale Divinity School. Leaving New Haven, I worked with Margaret Mead in Africa. I saw the consequences of IRA violence in London and experienced the unrest in Jerusalem firsthand, when a bomb was found on the bus I was riding. Eventually, I decided I wanted to return home and took an associate minister job at a local college town church in Missouri.
Then in the early 1980s, my life changed. I came out as a gay man, moved to New York City, and started working in the fashion industry. This was the height of the AIDS epidemic and it hit that industry hard. After five years, with many of my friends and colleagues suffering from HIV and AIDS, I made the decision to give up my career in fashion and become a hospital chaplain. My specialty would be working with AIDS patients, many of whom I knew socially or professionally.
I returned to active ministry through hospital chaplaincy in 1994. I trained at New York-Cornell, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and New York Methodist Hospitals. I was hired by Cabrini Medical Center, in part, because I was a board-certified chaplain who also happened to be gay and “out.” I could actively support patients who had been abused by religion and disowned by their families because they were gay and also had AIDS.
I loved Cabrini, now closed, because the hospital, with its core group of dedicated elderly Italian and other Catholic nuns, was one of the first to admit AIDS patients, even before the world knew what it was. This was a time of not touching door handles or using public water fountains. In those first years, thousands would die until protease inhibitors started to save so many infected with HIV. It was also a time of staff support groups for those who were dealing with the emotional impact of daily fatalities and “failure to thrive.” It was not unusual to hear Donna Summer played at a memorial service. Oftentimes, the professional intersected with the personal. I would sometime walk into a room and realize the patient was someone I knew. I met my husband through a couple who were living with HIV/AIDS, who are alive today because of treatment advances and life-saving research. I remember the dead, perpetual grief, and a time when sex could mean death.
That experience taught me so much about how dealing with anticipated death allows us to appreciate our lives and spirit. Eventually, it led me to Washington, DC, on that fateful day in September.
As a board-certified chaplain, I have responded to mass fatality disasters across the country, including September 11, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shooting, the Haiti earthquake, and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting. I have worked for the Red Cross as a spiritual care founder and have been featured as an expert in my field on CNN’s State of the Union and on MSNBC.
Disasters do not discriminate between culture, race, class, or geography. This is not an issue affecting small pockets of unlucky people. The whole country has been touched by tragedy: Hurricane Sandy; the Boston Marathon bombing; the shootings at the churches and synagogues in North Carolina, Texas, and Pennsylvania; Sandy Hook Elementary School; Columbine; the Aurora movie theater. Since the beginning of this project, there has been the Paris and Las Vegas shooting; the hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico; California wildfires and mudslides; the Parkland school shooting and the shooting in New Zealand. Through news and social media, it sometimes feels like we are exposed to one tragedy after another. The issue of how to respond to mass fatality disasters is, unfortunately, not going away.
In every place touched by disaster, people are longing for hope and comfort, striving to find purpose and meaning. After Hurricane Katrina alone there were 250,000 volunteers. People want to give and receive comfort from each other after these tragedies, but what exactly should they do? How should and could they respond? How do you talk to children about mass shootings or provide support to someone who has lost a loved one? How much can we endure?
Comfort answers these questions and many more. It is a book about easing grief and trauma after unimaginable horrors—plane crashes and mass murders, deadly tornadoes and terrorist acts. Comfort includes my personal recollections of responding to tragedy, combined with a practical application of what I have learned over the years. The book walks readers through the cycle of disaster care, using my firsthand experiences as examples. Comfort discusses the joys and stresses of volunteering (and managing volunteers) during and after disasters. It shows readers how their understanding of everyday trauma can help them respond to large-scale events. Finally, Comfort addresses the realities of dealing with special populations (children, elderly, etc.), as well as offering suggestions and guidance for the future.
Comfort provides the language of emotional and spiritual care and shares valuable wisdom gained from those who have worked in the worst of the worst situations. Whether you’re a spiritual care professional, the victim of a disaster, a family member, or watching a disaster unfold on TV, Comfort gives the reader guidance and support, including actions and words to use. Comfort provides hope and strength to those dealing with a disaster, showing how posttraumatic growth is possible even after unspeakable trauma. It’s not always easy, but it is possible.
I know this, because of my own personal and professional experiences. Let us go back to that day in September at Washington Hospital Center. As a hospital chaplain, you are trained to respond with care and compassion to people of all faiths (or no faith) even if their belief system is not the same as your own. When a request for a chaplain is made, whoever is on-call responds. And so when a family member of one of the burn victims from the Pentagon asked for spiritual support, the chaplain on-call was an imam from Saudi Arabia. The appearance of a Saudi Arab, a Muslim, responding to a victim of this terrorist attack caused a moment of initial shock. Would he be able to comfort this family?
When responding to someone in a traumatic situation, you have about ten seconds to get them to trust you, to figure out if you can help. If yes, wonderful—help. If not, get out of the way and find someone else for them to talk to. But either way, you can’t take it personally. So in this moment, the imam introduced himself as the chaplain on-call and waited. After a moment—a pause, a heartbeat—the family accepted his help. They ended up praying together.
Comfort is all about providing this kind of support and care, bringing people together under the worst of circumstances and allowing them to find purpose, meaning, and hope.