Finding Meaning in the Mystery
Recently, while I was working a hospice shift at an inpatient care center, a tearful, grieving man, rumpled from a long night spent at his dying father’s bedside, emerged from the room and muttered, “Your job sucks.” He paused self-consciously when a few of us—nurse, social worker, and myself, a hospice chaplain and death doula—all looked up with stunned chuckles. Backpedaling, he said, “I mean you’re amazing and all, but who would choose to do this?”
This is a common refrain when you tell people you work with the dying. To be fair, few of us feel amazing these days. We’re more careworn and stressed, standing in the shambles of our health-care system years into a pandemic. Frankly, dying is often gritty and full of suffering. At the same time, death is a powerful teacher for the living.
“Death is a shift to the great unknown,” says Kelly Arora, professor and
