After downing a couple of aspirins, I crawled into bed feeling as if returning home from a night of raucous carousing in a seedy bar. My knees ached, my head throbbed, and I longed to drift off into oblivion and forget. I woke up the next morning with many of the symptoms of a hangover without having partaken in the usual prerequisite of too much alcohol consumption the night before.
I experienced what my therapist once referred to as an emotional hangover.
I recently read Dr. John E. Sarno, M.D.’s book The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders. Even before reading this book, I believed in the mind-body connection. As a person with mental health challenges, I live with chronic neck, shoulder, and back pain. When the pain becomes more intense than normal, I know it is time to stop and assess the circumstances. If I ignore the emotional stressor, the physical symptoms could lead to more serious physical illness. For this reason, subscribing to Dr. Sarno’s research has been easy for me. I believe it.
Reading his book while staying connected with my therapist has helped me diagnose, process, and work through the emotional hangovers I sometimes experience.
The cause of this emotional hangover? An especially rough end to my shift as a hospital chaplain.
I strolled in front of the coffee stand, eyeing their costly but delectable treats when a voice on the intercom paged a chaplain to the children’s ER. Being the only chaplain on duty, I dismissed the temptation of a late-night snack and walked toward the call. The cadence of each step kept time with my heartbeat as I prayed for God’s leading and anointing. Adults I can handle. But children? Lord, have mercy.
As I walked by the nurse’s station, the staff pointed me toward Trauma A. Their facial expressions forewarned me about the chaos waiting for me. On the other side of the partially closed curtain, a nurse stood on one side of the woman I presumed to be the patient’s mother. A doctor turned from the foot of the bed, lifting her hands as she stepped toward Mom, and said “The good news is that he is no longer in pain. The bad news is he is no longer with us.” Cradling her face, the doctor continued, “Mom, we need you to breathe now.”
This woman’s two-year-old baby boy lay dead on the hospital bed in front of her.
By this point, I stood on the other side of the woman. I noticed that Mom’s grief caused her to stop breathing and her body to grow rigid. I wrapped my arm around her waist and reached for her hand. She squeezed my hand and leaned her weight onto me as we walked to the bedside. She caressed her son’s head and face and began to groan. The sobbing forced her to breathe, and the breathing steadied her legs. Once she regained her natural physical strength, I let go of my hold but remained standing beside her, rubbing her back.
She turned to me, her red and puffy face stained with water, salt, and mucus. Her eyes sought mine and she asked, “Why?” I could only shake my head.
Hours earlier, I began my shift with another death in another part of the hospital with another loved one asking the same question. “Why?” People often ask why. There is never a good or satisfactory answer, no matter the circumstances. My shift began with a family electing to make the difficult decision to withdraw care. Her husband of fifty years and her adult children gathered around the bedside. She lived a good, long life. Still, her son, a military veteran, asked me why. I knelt beside him. I offered no resolution, but we had a good chat, nonetheless.
It was a sad but routine encounter. It is not that I am numb or insensitive to death and the grief associated with it. Averaging more than fifty death responses since the beginning of the pandemic, COVID-19 fast-tracked my proficiency in bereavement (death and dying) care. The experience has given me a realistic vision and appreciation for life and death.
Responding to an adult death is like walking through the natural cycle of life. As I told the son, no one lives forever. We all die some time. The why, even if I had an answer for him, would not satisfy him. It still hurts. It still feels wrong and unfair.
I have been through enough such examples that I can navigate them well and often move on with relative ease. This time, standing with this mourning mother, watching her interactions with her lifeless two-year-old son, I had to take off my mask and glasses because there was no way I could keep from crying.
Nothing I could say or do would make anything about this situation bearable for her, so I simply stood beside her rubbing her back.
We refer to this as the Ministry of Presence.
When she went outside, I walked her out and stood just inside the doorway. Logistically, I needed to be able to let her back in but more than that, I wanted to give her space, but I also wanted to ensure her safety. Her grief was deep and raw. People do all kinds of things in such a state.
Back at the bedside, she looked at me again with that grief-stricken face and pleading eyes.
“What am I supposed to do now?” she rasped.
Another question with no logical or satisfying answer.
I took a deep breath, continued caressing her back, and whispered, “Breathe.” She sighed and turned back to face her baby boy. “That is the only thing you have to do right now. Just breathe.”
This is the kind of familial grief that gets to me. I can handle adult death and dying, but a child? A child? This is not how the cycle of life is supposed to be.
Mom’s grief calmed until her husband and other family members arrived. Dad scooped his son into his arms and buried his face into his body. The family encircled him, caressed the boy, and held onto one another. I stood back to give them space to be able to comfort one another, but stayed close just in case.
I spent approximately twenty minutes with the first grieving family of the night, and I spent over two hours with this family. Different circumstances. Different needs.
My role at the bedside ended, but the indirect need for my presence continued. His age elicited a mandatory police response and investigation. This was the first time that the boy’s nurse or responding officers ever dealt with the death of a child. Both looked to me for answers on how to respond to the nonmedical needs of the situation.
After attending to the family, the novice nurse, and novice police officers, I felt like I was walking away from the losing end of a bar fight. I woke up feeling as if I had drunk my weight in alcohol.
But there was no fight. There was no alcohol.
What I had was an overindulgence in emotional turmoil. Not only did I bring my pastoral authority into the room, but I brought my trauma experience, equipping me to support not just the family, but the novice staff as well.
But I left carrying their emotional weight with me.
I only experienced an alcohol-induced hangover once in my life. I was young and swore I would never do that again. I have not. Avoiding an alcohol-induced hangover requires nothing more than avoiding alcohol intake.
However, if I want to continue my work as a hospital chaplain, there is no avoiding the occasional emotional hangover. The cure is practicing what I preach and being proactive with my self-care routine.
When I was new to ministry, I naively thought I had to have it all together and I was afraid to share my failures and feelings with anyone other than my therapist. I especially felt like I could not talk to other chaplains, afraid they would think me too weak or out of my league, not right for this job that I love so much. Time, experience, and therapy have taught me that this is a dangerous fallacy.
What I have learned is that those of us in the caring field are not immune to emotional trauma. We are still human and if we fail to take our own advice and take care of our own mental health, we will have short or ineffective careers. Or as Dr. Sarno warns, our mental anguish may cause severe and debilitating physical pain.