Baptist and Buddhist
When I worked as an on-call chaplain at a level 1 trauma hospital, I almost never slept through the night. Whether it was a call to keep a lonely patient company or a call to sit vigil with a family as they watched their loved one take her last breaths, there was always somewhere to be. To be honest, this was the kind of call I would hope for—a quiet, calm call where the emergency was not so much about being the anchor in a human drama but rather about gracefully meeting an inevitability of our human condition. Loneliness. The death of an elder. The inverted blessings of being alive.