Universal Grief

I sat with an Alaska Native woman, whose common law husband was brought into the ER in critical condition. Since she was uncomfortable being right outside the patient room, we wound up sitting together in the waiting area, while she ate and drank with shaky hands, wondering if the staff would allow her the same rights as a legal spouse.

She eventually began telling me about life growing up in the village she lived in and later moving to Anchorage. She then shifted the conversation toward me and commented on the difficulty of being a chaplain. She thanked me for being a calm presence, and then she began to ‘read’ me, as a shaman might, telling me of my gifts, struggles, fears and motivations. Only, she wasn't looking at my palm, she was staring me straight in the eyes. Some of her statements were spot on, others were less accurate. But enough of what she was saying hit close enough to home to make me uncomfortable. She told me that one of her functions in the village was as a healer. She wasn’t the physical kind of healer, but another kind, a healer of the insides. She told me I have the same gift: to be a healer of the insides.

Despite my level of discomfort during this part of the conversation, I felt honored afterward feeling as if she put herself in a vulnerable place by sharing that part of her culture with me. I also felt a little bit humbled, as my usual response to such things is to relegate them to the category of tribal hocus-pocus. However, given this experience, my assumptions are now being re-ordered. One thing was certain, we came from very different cultural backgrounds.

After this ‘reading,’ I was able to redirect the conversation back toward her and the present situation with her live-in partner. And, in the following discussion she seemed to feel much safer, sharing with me her worries, grief and flowing tears. When she cried harder, she spoke a few words in a language I didn’t recognize, presumably the language of her native village. I was blessed to simply sit with her.

This snippet is one of many opportunities I’ve had this unit to minister to and be with people from a culture or cultures either mostly or completely unrepresented in the south. One of the lessons this visit, and others like it, taught me is that grief is universal. While expressions of grief vary between cultures, indeed they vary person to person; the pain of loss seems to remain a constant across humanity.

One social justice issue present in this visit was whether or not the medical staff would treat this woman with all the rights and privileges of a legal spouse or keep her at arms length, because she lacked a piece of paper from the court house with their names on it. In the end, aside from one comment by a nurse, she was treated as the spouse and spokes person for the patient who died soon after in the ER.