NOTE: All names of patients have been changed along with any identifying details.
I’m at the hospital and it’s a Sunday day shift. Jésus is assigned to me. He is a young adult with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma relapsed after a stem cell transplant. The most terrible luck at the most terrible time of his life. He is always stoic and uncommunicative, and today even more so as he clutches his abdomen, where the source of his sepsis must surely be. His fever rises and his body convulses in rigors. He won’t answer the doctor’s assessment questions, but maybe it’s because this cold, sterile system is so out of step with the profound, existential pain he is in. Jésus is dying and no one is saying that. But he knows it, and perhaps he does not see the point in answering questions that don’t address why his life has been cruelly interrupted.
My instinct when I meet Jésus and take in his firm, set jawline is to retract. My body responds to his walls with my own walls. I want to blame him. It’s so much easier that way. I don’t then have to wonder why this happened to him and not to me, and IF it will happen to me (or God forbid, my daughter). After twelve years as an oncology nurse, I know what that othering feels like at the end of the day – it feels like complicity in a violent system. A further division between an outer and inner self, a discordance between my head and heart that I can no longer afford. I can no longer afford because such discordance leads me towards a dark night of the soul, a depression with sharp, spiritual edges. And I don’t want to feel that way anymore.
Jésus’ youth was devoid of consistent parental figures, spent in and out of foster care, and his 18th birthday was met with this crushing diagnosis. He’s spent the last two years sick on his brother’s couch, two kids navigating this impossibility. And still despite all this, he’s labeled as “non-compliant,” and in so many ways we dismiss him. We don’t see that his whole life has been traumatic, including his cancer – his response to his life is only rational.
I am beginning to wonder about my place in the healthcare system. In a time where it is estimated that two-thirds of all cancer is caused by human-caused environmental toxins (Marusic, Kristina; A New War on Cancer, Island Press, 2023), how do we as clinicians interact with this larger injustice? I am nervous that we are self-satisfied by patching up some wounds, while ignoring our bigger collective sin of poisoning our brothers and sisters, of giving them cancer in the first place.
I plough forward with my nursing work. I try to be gentle as I measure Jésus’ vitals and draw his blood, orders I have to fulfill even if they’re not comforting to him. I hold his hand when I can and try to steady the shaking in his shoulders. My coworkers bring warm blankets, and we wrap him up. We don’t worry too much about assessment questions. We know they won’t change our sepsis protocol, and they won’t change this outcome. If together we can have some love in this fluorescent and linoleum room maybe we can all stave off some emptiness. At the end of the shift, Jésus still does not want to answer any questions. But he does say, “Thank you for helping me,” when I turn out the lights and pull his curtain shut. It’s me who needs to thank him for letting me in. I wonder if I could let someone in if we had traded journeys. I really don’t know.
I leave the hospital and cycle to an evening mass. I sit in the front row so that I can hear the repetition of the Communion procession in its entirety. “The body of Christ, the body of Christ, the body of Christ,” the heartbeat of Catholicity. Jésus may not be alive in the morning, but his life was not in vain. He lives on at this altar, just like his namesake.
What does the Eucharistic ritual mean? Growing up I learned about the Eucharist in a transactional way – go to mass, accept communion, and you’re “saved,” at least for the week. You can even leave before the final blessing as long as you’ve eaten the bread.
But in my adult life, I understand the Eucharist so differently. We must come to the Eucharist not for transactional salvation, but rather for healing. Jesus suffered through his Passion. Through the transubstantiation rite, we ingest His suffering, which witnesses and validates our own suffering. The Eucharist, the “Thanksgiving” as it translates to, serves as a weekly ritualized circle of witnessed suffering. The circle is complete, we are made whole. Maybe this healing IS the salvation.
God is not Catholic. And thus, the Eucharistic ritual is not the only way we heal. I believe in a Cosmic Christ, a Universal Messiah, active outside of time and beyond any human definition or confines. A generative Love that moves us all. I believe in Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s God, the God that is “the most moved Mover.” The Eucharist moves me because I was born into Catholicism, and as author Krista Tippett says, the religion from which we come is our “mother tongue.” Its truths are written into my epigenes and unlock the communion with God I need as a human.
Through witnessing suffering and through having our suffering witnessed, we are made whole. This is the human experience. I feel this deeply, as my time with my patients highlights the painful beauty of our earthly lives. I return home after a shift to my husband and daughter, acutely aware of the gift of this moment, and knowing that our time together is but a season. Without such witnessing, I would not breathe in the scent of my daughter’s curls so deeply or kiss each freckle on her face every night like I do. And my weekly time with the Eucharist is the connection to the human universality of this timeless truth.
Back in the hospital, Hannah settles back into her stretcher as a bag of blood drips into her arm, temporarily reviving her. In some ways, this is Sisyphean– her bone marrow is destroyed from so much chemotherapy and can no longer produce its own blood cells. These new cells will live just a few days. But the energy she’ll feel now will palliate her symptoms, and with her blood count boosted, Hannah has the strength to chat. She loves to chat and, in the past, has talked to me about her beloved husband, who died years ago. But today she tells me the story of her name, which is really a story about where she comes from and the suffering from which she was born.
Hannah tells me her name means “grace,” and certainly her existence is God-sent. Her father was a Jewish Berliner living in the time of Hitler. Surviving Kristallnacht, he fled with his siblings. They somehow made their way to New York City with forged passports. In the ensuing years, they would see more than a dozen family members perish in the Holocaust.
One of my favorite verses passes through my mind – “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” Matthew 24:1-25:46).
Hannah is done talking for now. She leans back into her pillow and closes her eyes as the last of today’s transfusion drips in. Someday soon she will not reopen her eyes. I want to hold her story dear, to pay tribute to the Jewish tradition of keeping one’s ancestors alive through memory. Hannah’s wan and cachectic face is radiantly beautiful. It is the face of Christ, as is her father’s face before her, as is their murdered ancestors.
The faces of our suffering patients fall around me, visit me when I close my eyes, talk to me when I pray…Like Mev Puleo’s photographs in The Faces of Poverty, the Faces of Christ.
I don’t know what my place in healthcare will be in the future. But I do know there is no joy without first grief, there is no communal humanity without witnessed suffering. These faces of Christ and this Body of Christ will be my guide.
