Gathering the Gleanings: Reflections on Life in the Ministry

I am around end of life issues in both jobs I have – it is the holiest ground I stand on. Both Trellis (hospice for non Winston area folk) and the church.

In fact I’ve been gathered around beds as people took their last breaths for 26 years – even children, when I worked at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Parents would leave their precious child in my arms as they walked away and closed the door. Never to hold them again. I’ve been with 104 year olds lives full of stories, some never shared before, as they have taken their last breath. I’ve been with every age in between.

I’ve had friends think I’m on auto pilot when it comes to death. Sure my adrenaline pumps and I go down a checklist in the moment. I jump into action until things settle.

Then the grief rushes over me. I don’t know what to do. I remember one of my first deaths when I was a pastor. It was late at night and I had been with the family and we finally left the facility and the person that tolled the bell, once for every year a person was alive, announcing a death to the community, was a grandson.

I offered to have someone do it in the morning and he was insistent that he would do it that night. It was part of his grieving process. I stood in the parsonage kitchen, right next to the church, and jumped with tears streaming down my face with each toll. Joe stood with me. I too was grieving the loss of a precious soul. I wonder if that tradition lives on?

This past month I’ve dealt with death on both the pastoral side of my life and personally. A patriarch of the church and I still talk to him when I’m alone in the church. One of my dear friends in New Jersey lost her valiant fight with cancer. She was the friend that was there whenever no matter how long it had been. She carried me through my early years of ministry, she taught me much about life and cancer. She showed me what love looked like and what it was like to have a friend who you could trust to the core of your being. She was and still does encapsulate love.

Even though, I’m surrounded by death almost every day, I deeply grieve. Tears well up in my eyes when I think of these two deaths. I was at church when I heard of my friends death and I had tears streaming down my face as I went and sat in the sanctuary. God is here and God is in the other place. I’m grateful God is here because at least I have my faith and God’s presence to lean on.

So my friends, even when those working with death and end of life issues day in and day out, seem to have it all together when someone dies, let me stand here and say it likely hurts and will continue to hurt for them – it does me. We will grieve along with you, it just may look a little different (as does grief in general). We cry in the shower and scream into our pillows too.

Death is hard! No what matter what!

“May the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of the son, Jesus Christ, our Lord; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be with you all. Amen.” (Liturgy of the Moravian Church.)