As an interfaith hospice chaplain for the past 16 years, I have often returned to an underlying principle of our care: Each person we serve, whether fully conscious or unresponsive, rich or poor, likeable or unlikeable, is deserving of the same care and respect.
I learned that lesson in my 20s as an orderly in a state mental hospital. I worked in a unit where patients labeled as mentally ill were often forgotten, controlled by drugs and written off by the larger society. One of those patients was a chronic alcoholic named Lester. Lester was only 62 but appeared, in his skeletal, emaciated frame, like a man in his late 80s. Plagued with dementia from his years of drinking, Lester spent his days stooped and shuffling about the unit’s day room, hands in his pockets, drooling and mumbling to himself, sometimes loudly cursing. He appeared to be a lost soul who would live out his remaining days in that condition.
I was often assigned to take care of Lester, changing his pants when he was incontinent, leading him to meals and feeding him. He was frequently stubborn and cantankerous, cursing me and sometimes overturning his tray. His rebellious spirit gradually endeared me to him as, eyeing my oatmeal-covered pants, he would flash a mischievous grin.
One day, as I was leading Lester by the hand to the cafeteria, him as usual kicking and cursing, we passed the hospital’s administrative office. One of the administrators, a well-dressed middle-aged woman, looked up from her desk and scowled: “Why do you bother?” I remember feeling hurt, not only at this dismissal of my patient but at the denigration of my work.
I had no answer to her question that day but a couple weeks later, Lester did. I entered our unit one morning to find Lester standing in a corner with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face. He was singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” I had never really had a conversation with Lester but that day, in his relative lucidity, he told me he had indeed worked on the railroad — as a brakeman, no less! And he had had a wife and children.
I hadn’t really stopped to think Lester had lived a life, that he had a story, that inside of this wasted and rejected man was a soul. I now had an answer to the administrator’s question: I would bother to care for all of my patients as if all lives mattered; I would try to remember that within each of us is a story worth telling and hearing, a soul that is given us at birth and, however tarnished our minds or diminished our bodies, remains our link to our Creator.
As a hospice chaplain, I often enter into places where people feel diminished both physically and mentally, ravaged with cancer, respiratory and cardiac disease or dementia. A central part of my job is to affirm the abiding presence of the divine in all of us — what many call the soul.
At a recent meeting in Greenfield, I was moved by the compassion expressed by many for those neighbors who are homeless, those who are often stigmatized, shunned and labeled as malefactors: former inmates, psychiatric patients, addicts, sex offenders and others. I was heartened to hear dozens saying, not “Why bother?” but rather “What can we do to help our neighbors?”
My prayer for our community is that we increasingly extend a helping hand to those who have been stigmatized, to affirm the sacredness of every life.
Ben Tousley is interfaith spiritual counselor for Cooley Dickinson Hospice and past president and vice president of the Interfaith Council of Franklin County. A longtime folk singer and storyteller, Tousley lives in Greenfield and attends Mount Toby Friends Meeting.