Exhausted hospital chaplains help bring solace
LOS ANGELES » Inside hospital rooms across America, where the sick are alone without family to comfort them, the grim task of offering solace falls to overworked and emotionally drained hospital chaplains who are dealing with more death than they’ve ever seen.
Last week nearly a dozen died on a single day at the 377-bed Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, a gleaming, modern medical facility that is tucked into the northwest corner of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Three more passed — within a span of 45 minutes — the next day.
As he has each day for the past 11 months, Chaplain Kevin Deegan sits with the sick and dying, clad in a facemask, face shield, gloves and full body cover. He prays with them, holds their hands, gently brushes their foreheads and reassures them there is nothing to fear.
‘Say some prayers’
Grieving families, unable to enter the hospital because of the deadly virus, watch through the iPad he’s carried into the room with him.
“All right, Miss Leticia, it’s Chaplain Kevin. We’re going to say some prayers now. Ok, my dear?”
“She can hear you,” he tells her son, Jayson Lim, urging him to talk to her.
“Yo, Ma,” Lim manages to say before breaking down in tears and burying his head in his hands. Later he’ll pray with her.
Deegan, who ministered to people undergoing hospice and palliative care before joining Holy Cross two years ago, is no stranger to
death. But still, he says, he and his fellow chaplains had seen nothing like this before COVID-19 struck last year and began to kill people by the hundreds of thousands. Close to 400,000 people have died in the U.S. alone.
Holy Cross is filled with so many COVID-19 patients that it has had to double up some people in intensive care rooms and put others in areas normally reserved for outpatient care and patient recovery. A makeshift area at the end of a hallway has even been turned into a hospital room.
Long hours
Deegan and about a dozen other chaplains cover shifts that extend to 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As Chaplain Anne Dauchy prays for a woman during her last moments, the patient’s loved ones watching through Dauchy’s iPad can be heard sobbing in the background and saying words like, “I love you so much, Mamma” and “Thank you for everything.’”
“We try to kind of reframe what a miracle is,” an exhausted Dauchy says afterward. “Sometimes it’s living another day, sometimes it’s a patient opening their eyes.
“Perhaps that’s the miracle, that she’s at rest and at peace and not suffering anymore,” she says of the woman who died.
When asked how he, Dauchy and the others manage to survive the turmoil emotionally, Deegan replies, “That’s a good question. I have to be honest. I don’t know.”
What he does know is when he saw doctors, nurses and other hospital staff risking
their own lives to do everything they could to save others he felt he had to be there, right in the room with them, to offer comfort and be a surrogate for their loved ones who couldn’t be there.
He was sure he’d eventually be infected as COVID-19 patients began pouring into the hospital every day. So far he has not, and just last week he had his second dose of the vaccine.
“Who knew PPE really works,” he said with a chuckle during a rare lighthearted moment as he discussed the personal protective equipment he dons each day before work.