Brian Gowan sang hymns and prayed to an empty temple on Friday.
But he wasn’t alone. His Easter message was broadcast into rooms across Methodist Hospital, where he is a chaplain. It was his attempt to help his patients find some sense of normalcy on Christianity’s holiest days.
“We’ve been ministering to a lot of Jobs,” he said a few days earlier, referencing the Old Testament character whose faith God tested by taking his family, wealth and health. “It’s heart wrenching. It really is.”
Faith is what drove Gowan to this line of work. But it’s not his job to evangelize or persuade. Chaplaincy is more than anything about listening, about providing a nonjudgmental ear to those wrestling with deep questions that so often lack answers.
The coronavirus has complicated that work. The highly infectious virus has meant fewer face-to-face interactions with patients and more time spent with grieving and, at times, guilt-ridden families whose final goodbyes have been relegated to iPads, letters and FaceTime.
And the deluge of daily trauma has only exacerbated the burnout and emotional exhaustion that has always accompanied the job.
Research from chaplains’ associations shows that those in the field are significantly more likely than most to report feelings of burnout or, worse, emotional numbness. Gowan said that while he and other chaplains have developed coping mechanisms over the years, the ever-present threat posed by COVID has made it harder to unwind or unpack the vicarious trauma they experience each day.
“You can only take so many bubble baths to wash away what you see each day,” said Dawn Malone, a chaplain with the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.
She’s seen countless deaths in the last year, has ministered to too many grieving families, nurses and doctors. And yet, days before the start of the second Easter in pandemic, her faith and hope are unshaken.
“We’re not all the way there yet,” Malone said. “But there is light shining out of the tomb.”
‘Nobody here’
Enrique Contreras Martinez has stopped counting the number of patients he’s lost to the virus at St. Luke’s Hospital, fearing his daily tallies would turn him more cynical in a time and place so desperate for hope.
“It became overwhelming,” he said. “There were a couple of weeks where I had two deaths every day.”
And so he did what he knows best — he empathized.
“One of the things that we as chaplains know how to do is to allow ourselves to feel,” he said. “To allow ourselves to experience the feelings and allow ourselves to let them be.”
It hasn’t been easy: Martinez grew up Catholic in Mexico, where hugs and physical touch are embedded into daily interactions.
He’s thought often of his parents, both of whom are around the same age as many of the patients he watched wither away in solitude.
Cooking nightly meals gave him some sense of control but did little to diminish the fear looming in his off-hours.
“I can’t escape COVID even when I leave the hospital,” he said. “You go to the store and you’re reminded. You can’t see your own family. It was like there was no way out.”
Narjess Kardan, at Methodist Hospital, felt the same. She is Muslim and often works with international patients, consoling families through video screens separated by thousands of miles.
It often reminds her of the distance of her own family in Iran, where she lived until immigrating to the United States a few years ago.
“Many times when I’m coming out of their rooms, I get broken,” she said. “Cracked and broken. Really broken.”
She started journaling and writing poetry about patients she lost as a way to process her own grief.
“I needed to remember them,” she said. “That was my way.
“They had nobody here.”
‘My peace’
It’s a feeling Alex Chamorro has known all too well since checking into Methodist last year. Her husband had been dead for a month by the time she awoke from a six-week coma in November.
Chamorro, her husband, brother and elderly mother all were hospitalized with COVID last summer. Chamorro was the last of them to fall into a coma and the last to wake up.
When she did come to, it was to a hospital room filled with family, friends and members of her church — but not her husband of 16 years.
Her brother broke the news to her shortly after. Chamorro couldn’t speak or move, and she spent the next month intubated, unable to do more than read and silently process her loss as chaplains prayed or sat quietly with her at Methodist Hospital.
“They reaffirmed my faith,” she said. “And that is the source of my strength. It is the source of my peace.”
Gowan, the Methodist chaplain who led worship services on Friday, was among those who worked with Chamorro and her family.
He still gets choked up when he thinks about her and others he’s met, or lost, over the last year.
“It’s been basically a 9/11 every day,” he said. “We’ve never had to deal with these kinds of feelings or emotions before.”
And yet, his work feels more important now than ever. Many of Gowan’s patients are waiting on transplants, and some have been unable to see family members for months at a time.
They cherish Gowan’s random check-ins and conversations. “The only thing else I can do is wait,” joked Kiven Leday, a 55-year-old truck driver who has been at the hospital on and off for the last six months as he waits for a new heart.
Gowan, meanwhile, said he’s felt closer to many patients and hospital staff during the pandemic. He’s more prayerful these days, he said, and has found deeper meaning in the scripture that already guided his life.
He does not deny the darkness of the last year.
“But light is coming,” he said.
robert.downen@chron.com
twitter.com/robdownenchron
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