I try not to drink as much diet soda anymore because I know it’s not good for me. But sometimes, especially towards the end of the work day, I get a craving for one. And as I dig for change in my bag, I will sometimes say things like “If God wants me to have this soda, then I will find enough money.” And if I don’t find enough money, I just keep digging. Sometimes, this means scouring my desk and the surrounding area for any change that may have magically fallen (it never has). Instead of accepting this as God’s will, I might do what I did today which is ask my colleague in the next cubicle if he has the last thirty cents that I need. He didn’t. All this to say: I have terrible theology, an ability to justify whatever I want, and a stubborn tendency towards magical thinking. I am–in microcosmic form–everything that is wrong with religion.
But what is so irresistible about soda? Why do I become a religious fundamentalist when it comes to Coke Zero? Admittedly, I come from a family of soda addicts so I may be more predisposed towards genetically impaired impulse control issues when it comes to caramel coloring. For decades, my grandma’s refrigerator was perpetually stocked with regular Pepsi. One of my uncles lost something like 40 pounds when he finally cut out regular Pepsi from his life. Likewise, my mother is never more than a few feet away from a can of Diet Pepsi. My parents’ garage houses two cars, Christmas decorations, and Diet Pepsi. (And, to be fair, a few other things). My love for Coke Zero already establishes me as the black sheep in the family but my recent experiment of drinking something called water has only pushed me further to the fringe.
Several years ago, on a summer day in the Central Valley when the temperatures exceeded 100 degrees, my ex-husband and I were helping my parents literally move a ton of dirt in the backyard. We were all sweating profusely. My seventy-year-old father with a history of heart problems was disassembling a deck while we moved the dirt one wheelbarrow at a time. My mom who had been working inside the house, popped her head out and asked my father if he wanted something to drink. He did. She brought him a Diet Pepsi. This exchange unfolded as it has a thousand times before. My ex-husband and I shook our heads in disbelief. Although, to be clear, I had absolutely no right to judge. (Please see the above comment about water).
I say all this because I know from personal experience that soda has an undeniably strong pull on the human appetite. Yet it still surprises me how many times in my career as a hospice chaplain that a patient has expressed a fierce yearning for a cold soda. There are so many intangible things about my work and I don’t always know if I am helping. But when I give someone a soda who has been hankering for one and they take that first sip and connect to a moment of delight in the midst of all that they’re going through then I know I’ve done something good.
(By the way, I feel ambivalent publicly reflecting on this phenomenon because I fear when soda companies get word about this phenomenon, hospices will suddenly have corporate sponsors and be re-named things like Pepsi Hospice of Aspartame Angels.)
Recently, I said my good-byes to a patient whose love of soda surpassed most. An ornery, withdrawn man, he shut himself off from the world. He refused all contact with his children. Even now, I can’t say whether they know that their father is dead. Except for meals, he spent nearly every hour of every day in bed even when he had the choice and strength to go out on warm and sunny days. This went on for years. He frequently called his room at the facility his prison and once told another hospice team member that this was his punishment for not having been a good man. He never talked in greater detail about what he meant by this but from the little I knew of his life, including a long history of alcoholism and being an absentee father, I could believe his self-evaluation had merit.
I first met him four or five years ago when he first came onto hospice. Despite his general misanthropic nature, he tolerated the hospice team. Dare I say it, I think he liked us. But when his condition stabilized a year or so later, he “graduated” from our service. There was a long gap when I didn’t see him at all. I can’t say exactly what it was about him but he is only one of two patients to whom I have made soul commitment that I wouldn’t leave hospice until they died. When he graduated due to improved prognosis, I expected this would be a commitment I would not be able to keep. But it turns out that it was.
We never talked much. Once or twice he flat kicked me out. So I knew I made a breakthrough when he began to welcome me to stay awhile. Every single time. Yes, sometimes he only said two or three words to me. But in those words were his invitation to me to stay. So every week I would sit with him for a little while.
In the beginning, I tried all of my chaplain tricks to make connections and build rapport with him. When the birds were singing and the sun was shining, I did my best to tempt him to sit outside with me. In rare moments when he would let slip his love for the ocean, I tried to build on that but to little avail. The most interest I saw him take in life was during football season. But he was a Raiders fan. So the joy a dying man could find in that diversion was limited. Still, I brought him the green sports section that appears every Monday in the San Francisco Chronicle like he requested. Along with the strawberry soda.
When I discovered that he loved strawberry soda, it was like God put a little bit of pixie dust in my pocket. Because every week, I got to be the soda fairy. I would stop by the gas station and buy two deliciously cold strawberry Fantas. (I claim Fantas-tic Hospice as mine.) I would put soda in his fridge and give him the other. The small signs of decline were present in this ritual. For a long time, he was able to twist the cap off on his own. Then he needed my help. Then he needed me to hold the bottle. But every time he took that first swig of that artificially flavored carbonated corn syrup was like witnessing a beautiful sunset or the unbound joy of a small child. As shut off as he was from the world, something in him was still capable of bliss. Even if he could only take it in by sips. Watching his expressionless, withdrawn face open into pure delight became one of my favorite moments of my week, too. Bliss by proxy.
God, how I wanted him to know a little more of that joy. From the time I met him, I imagined possibilities for him that included a fairy-tale hospice death complete with reconciled relationships, transcendent heart openings, and light from Heaven. Hell, I made a soul contract with him that I wouldn’t leave my job until he died because I felt in some way responsible for him and his happiness. In short, I was looking for a way to break him out of jail. Because that’s what I wanted for him. I never got a hint from him that this is what he wanted for himself.
I was a minister with a messianic complex. How original of me.
Luckily, the work I do has a way of working on me. So after eight years of being a hospice chaplain, I am finally learning that I can’t save anyone. And one of the most important lessons for a habitual know-it-all and would-be savior like myself is learning when to shut up. Truly, I am increasingly certain that the art of shutting up might be one of the most advanced spiritual skills I can offer anyone.
Last year, I graduated to the next level of shutting up the day I was sitting with a man with a terminal diagnosis of cancer and at a very important moment in our conversation together I kept my mouth shut. A large tumor alive with red and purple streaks covered half his face. Though shocking to see at first his warmth of personality shined through so clearly that the tumor faded into the background. A gem of a man, everyone loved him because he had a way of making everyone feel loved. As a testimony to this, the inmates at the prison where he once worked as a teacher continued to send him letters even years after he retired and they were released.
So when this kind and loving and self-aware man told me that his tumor was atoning for his past sins my first instinct was to tell him that this wasn’t true, that he didn’t need to feel punished like this. He told me he’d done something bad but that he couldn’t tell me what it was–he’d never told anyone–but he knew that the tumor was burning it up. I wanted to say something to save him from this experience of punishment. I wanted to convince him of how he is loved for just who he is. Instead, I shut up. I didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I did something simple. I agreed with him. There were Eastern spiritual traditions, I said, that would see his tumor in a similar way.
We talked a little more. Then something almost as miraculous as me shutting up happened. He told me the thing he had never told anyone. He told me what sin he believed the tumor was burning up. Before his confession, I imagined something terrible and gruesome. And it was. But not in the way I expected. Many years before, he found himself in one of those situations in life where one is forced to make a decision for which there is no good outcome. He did the best with the options he was given in a truly awful moment of time. And even then it was clear that he was acting from a place of love. For decades he carried the guilt despite having been clearly powerless to do anything different that day. I loved him even more for the burdens of his heart.
When I returned the following week and walked into the room, he jokingly told me “It’s all your fault.” I had no clue what he was talking about. He said I had been the one to help him and that it was all my fault. Because he was legally blind and I was confused, I momentarily thought he might be mistaken about who he was talking to until he started to tell me the story of what had transpired in the last 48 hours. In the middle of the night, he woke up to an intense pain crisis. He sat up in the dark and confronted God, saying, “I don’t deserve this pain. I didn’t put Jesus on the cross. I don’t deserve his suffering.” And then, amazingly, the pain went away.
For two hours, he sat in complete darkness and complete comfort. Not one to identify as religious or spiritual, he didn’t want to describe that time as meditation or prayer. He didn’t want to put any “labels” on what he had experienced. He just wanted to go with the flow, noting that for the first time in his life he was comfortable just being himself. He was comfortable in his own skin, tumor and all. “I never thought I’d say I’m having fun dying,” he said.
Later, when I asked him permission to tell this story–which he gave me as long as I didn’t give out certain details related to his life and confession–I asked him what he would want people to know about dying. And he said that he would want them to know not to be afraid. And whether he told me the following before or after this I can’t remember but he said whatever happens in life that eventually the “good bubbles to the top.”
He credited me for helping him. But seriously, my entire spiritual intervention in that moment can be summed up as: I shut up. And being silent for that moment mattered to him in a way that I don’t pretend to understand entirely. I simply honored what was true for him without judgment, without thinking that I knew better for his life, or what he needed to be saved from his suffering. That has not exactly been my modus operandi in life. So it was significant for me to realize that by making space for his experience without trying to change it that perhaps he felt safe enough to share what else was true for him, a truth that he had not felt safe to share at any other point in his life. And once he could release that then there was nothing else keeping the good bubbles in his soul from naturally rising to the top.
But what happens when the soda of a person’s life has gone flat? And there aren’t any bubbles to rise to the top. When you shut up like you’re supposed to but all there is is a frozen kind of silence. I’m happy to keep my mouth shut if I know that there will be good and tangible things to arise in that silence. But that’s not what usually happens.
I kept bringing the strawberry sodas to the man who loved being out on the open ocean but stayed in his self-imposed prison. Not a single window opened to his cell. His decline was tortuously slow. Inch by inch, he contracted in bed. His face became bony and gaunt. For a long time, when I sat with him as he slept or faced the wall and pretended to sleep, I would prayerfully imagine the walls of his prison cell dissolving. I wanted to imagine him free of all that was holding him back from living more deeply into the bliss of this life that the strawberry soda was a signpost for. But over the years, as I began to come to terms with the truth that I could not save him–nor should I feel the need to–my meditation changed. It was like something in me finally said, “Okay, this is where you are. And this is where you need to be. I won’t fight you on it. I don’t know what’s best for you. I’m just going to shut up now. But here, I brought you a strawberry soda.”
A few days before he died, I sat at his bedside like I usually did. He was minimally responsive by then. And I did something that I almost never do during my visits with patients. I started to cry. I thought maybe I should leave to pull myself together. But something in me said to stay. And the tears bubbled to the surface. I cried because I had seen the part of his heart that was capable of bliss and love. I cried for all that he never got to experience with that heart which he had so forcefully shut off to himself and the world. I cried because I wanted him to know he was loved and that he will be missed. And that he had touched lives for the better even when he tried not to. I felt like a surrogate in a way, crying for others who were once a part of his life and who would never have a chance to work out their peace with him. I cried with acceptance at all I have not been able to save in my own life. I cried with gratitude for the small things in life that truly matter in our journey towards freedom and joy. Because even though Joseph Campbell famously said: “Follow your bliss,” for many of us we must first find our strawberry soda.