When I was twenty-two and working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, I would spend twenty-four hours on call once or twice a week. This meant that I’d stay in the hospital with two beepers. One beeper went off whenever someone asked for a chaplain. The other buzzed when a serious trauma case arrived at the hospital. One of my last nights on call, toward the end of my six-month chaplaincy, I was asleep in the pastoral care office when the trauma pager sent me down to the Emergency Department. A three-year-old child was being wheeled in. He’d suffered severe burns.
I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to talk about the suffering of others without exploiting that suffering, whether you can write about pain without glorifying or ennobling or degrading it. Teju Cole once said that “a photograph can’t help taming what it shows,” and I worry the same might be true of language. Stories have to make sense, and nothing at the hospital made any sense to me at all, which is one of the reasons I’ve rarely written about my time there directly. I don’t know the proper way through this morass, and I never have, but in telling this story, I’ve chosen to obscure and alter certain details. The important thing is that despite the severity of his injury, the child was conscious, and in terrible pain.
Although I’d been around the Emergency Department for months, and seen all manner of suffering and death, I’d never seen the trauma team so visibly upset. The anguish was overwhelming—the smell of the burns, the piercing screams that accompanied this little boy’s every exhalation. Someone shouted, “CHAPLAIN! THE SCISSORS BEHIND YOU!” and in a daze I brought them the scissors. Someone shouted, “CHAPLAIN! THE PARENTS!” And I realized that next to me the little boy’s parents were screaming, trying to get at their kid, but the doctors and paramedics and nurses needed enough space to work, so I had to ask the parents to step back.
Next thing I knew I was in the windowless family room in the Emergency Department, the room where they put you on the worst night of your life. It was quiet except for the crying of the couple across from me. They sat on opposite sides of the couch, elbows on knees.
During my training they told me that half of marriages end within a couple years of losing a child. Weakly, I asked the parents if they wanted to pray. The woman shook her head no. The doctor came in and said that the kid was in critical condition. The parents only had one question, and it was one the doctor couldn’t answer. “We’ll do everything we can,” she said, “but your son may not survive.” Both the parents collapsed, not against each other, but into themselves.
* * *
We are able to navigate the world knowing these things happen. My chaplaincy supervisor once told me, “Children have always died. It is natural.” That may be true, but I can’t accept it. I couldn’t accept it sitting in the windowless family room, and I can’t accept it now, as a father myself.
* * *
When the kid finally went upstairs to the ICU and his parents followed, I walked to the break room to get a cup of coffee, and the doctor was in there, her face hovering over a trash can that she’d been vomiting into. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You did good with them. Thanks for being kind to them. I think it helped.” She dry heaved for a while and then said, “That kid’s gonna die and I know his last words. I know the last thing he’ll ever say.” I didn’t ask her to tell me what it was, and she didn’t volunteer.
A week later, I finished the chaplaincy program, and decided not to go to divinity school. I told everyone it was because I didn’t want to learn Greek, which was true, but it was also true that I couldn’t cope with the memory of this kid. I still can’t cope with it. I thought about him every day. I prayed for him every day, even after I stopped praying about anything else. Every night, still, I say his name and ask God for mercy. Whether I believe in God isn’t really relevant. I do believe, however tenuously, in mercy.
As an inveterate googler, I knew I could have just looked up his name, but I