the solitude

When I am with others, there are usually ample opportunities to have hope confirmed for me. There may be moments of praise, or the quiet affirmation of work well-done, or the simple joy of being with co-workers whose presence makes me happy.

In the evening, when the hospital quiets, solitude falls like a familiar, comforting blanket.

I quietly choose when I shall eat, if at all, when I shall sit at the computer terminal and peck away at the endless charting that is the repetitive task of all health care workers. I remember to breathe deeply, to relax my shoulders which is where my tension gets stored, sit more upright, and move through my list the way one would move through an overgrown garden pulling weeds.

I stand, gather myself, not forgetting my loose-leaf binder with my lists and census. I have colleagues who seem to keep this in their heads. I congratulate them--long ago I made peace with having a 1.0 memory in a 3.0 world.

I quietly pad down now-empty hallways trying not to tromp in my worn Keen hiking shoes. I pass through units, checking on any so-called "hot spots" where a patient's acuity or a family's distress has emerged.

Or I seek a patient who has asked for one of us. As they go about their evening, poking at the remnants of dinner usually with the TV droning eternally in the background, I enter, utterly unknowing as to why I have been called. Loneliness? Religious devotion? Fear of an upcoming surgery? Confrontation with the truth of their lives, the isolation or the regret or the broken relationships or the deep disappointment upon realizing that they have lived their lives and they are far closer to its ending than its beginning? This last is the hardest. "This has been my life..." The most awkward and destructive lie our culture teaches is that life is endless possibility and in a sense never-ending. Many's the time I have sat in silence with someone whose rage or tears or silent despair fills the room as they realize that they have lived their life, and there it is, and what if any sense is made by all those empty promises of unending possibility?

All these conversations, disclosure of deeply human realities, face me with my own questions, draw from me moments of connection or identification or recognition.

Their solitude becomes mine as I pad about. If the encounter fills me to the brim with their own desperation and despair, I may stop in the chapel and, respectfully, ask the Silent One to allow all that pain to pass through me into the bottomless depths of the Divine Heart. I can't carry it.

If an urgent need does not drop from the ceiling or come at a run into the ICU or whip with a screaming siren into the ED, I leave for my solitary drive home. Solitary, except for the mute little grey box that may suddenly awaken and beep insistently, calling me back to those halls for God only knows what. But, if it sleeps, I shall sleep.

And that is the solitude. That is the life. Who heeds the solitary chaplain coming and going, walking the empty halls, quiet but ready? Solitude descends like a comforting cloak. For it is my turn to take this shift.

But that is the solitude. That is the life.