Jefre, Chaplain Resident, New York
By Philip Sherburne
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Jefre is a chaplain resident at a hospital in New York. This is his story.
What does a chaplain do?
We provide spiritual, religious, and emotional support to patients, families, and staff in the hospital. We might run support groups, where patients can talk about emotion and coping mechanisms. Another thing is being with families as their loved ones are dying, being with people who are in the hospital and need someone to talk to, people who are going through spiritual crises, family support.
Do you serve any particular denomination?
In the last 10 years or so, the field has been through a lot of changes, and chaplains now, at least in the United States, are largely interfaith. So I’m trained to be a multi-faith chaplain, even though I’m a Buddhist practitioner, soon to be a Buddhist priest.
Why did you decide to become a chaplain?
I had been interested for a long time in doing hospice care and end-of-life care. Then when I moved to New York, I thought maybe this would be a good chance to look into doing hospice work. If you really want to do it as a career, then you should become a certified chaplain. I had to go to theology school and do a residency, which I’m doing now. Then I can apply for board certification.
You’re also a musician and an artist. Has your work as a chaplain had any effect on that side of your life?
Not directly. I haven’t really made a record since I’ve been working in the hospital, since last summer. Maybe I’ll have time to process all this at some point and things will change. But right now it’s hard. It’s exhausting work. To be honest with you, I haven’t felt super creative. In August, I went into the studio to start working on a new record, and it’s just been sitting on my hard drive. I can’t get it together to even start working on it.
How has your life changed since the coronavirus struck?
Quite dramatically. We’re not allowed to go into the rooms of patients who are positive, which is almost everybody now — there aren’t really patients in the hospital for other reasons.
I was on site the first couple of weeks that this hit New York, and we weren’t sure if we were going to be vectors for patients with compromised immune systems. I mostly do phone support now — I call patients, I call their families, I help to try to organize priests for families when their family members are dying. It’s quite a dramatic shift. It’s pretty disorienting, which is true for all of my colleagues. Everybody’s trying to figure out how to best serve as a chaplain when you can’t even go into the room. It’s intense. Most nurses, doctors, and staff can’t even stop to eat, really.
What kind of emotional support do you have around you?
Having my family, that helps. I’ve got a young daughter, she’s almost four now. That’s good. I have my Zen Buddhist community, and then I’m constantly on the phone or doing Zoom meetings with my colleagues. I feel like I’m getting a lot of support, but it’s hard. My work is all COVID. My partner and I, our lives are turned upside down because of COVID. You turn on the news and that’s all you hear. You get on Facebook and that’s what you see.
Previously, although the work was really hard and emotionally draining, I could go home and transition into a different reality. That doesn’t exist anymore. This is an existential crisis that the whole world is going through.
How has this changed your view of your profession?
I’m so deep in it right now, I need time to process it. Everybody’s separated and we’re all scrambling to try to figure out how to support each other. I don’t know how this event will transform things.
What is the most difficult and frustrating part of this for you?
Being separated from people, just the lack of human contact. I’ve been trained to hold someone’s hand when they’re dying. We can’t do that anymore. That’s really hard. It’s frustrating when someone is so deeply grieving and in so much pain and all we can do is talk over the phone.
My training is all about being right there with people, and sometimes words don’t work. Your presence does a lot. You can just be there with someone when they’re grieving, just listening to their pain or their joy or whatever. But here, you don’t know people. You’ve never seen their face before. And on the phone, you don’t have body language. The smallest gesture can communicate compassion or kindness, and we can’t do that anymore.
If you could be granted one wish right now, what would it be?
That we see the ways that inequality is so shot through our social structures. Right now, in the United States, in New York, Latinos and African Americans are dying in higher proportions because of systemic racism and income inequality, access to health care.
I just hope that we can transform ourselves into a more compassionate and equitable society. In the midst of this crisis, how could you not see that there’s such a deep asymmetry in our culture? I hope that this is a wake-up call, you know, just how much suffering our economic systems create, not only in this country but globally.
What are you listening to?
In the evenings, when we have dinner, we’re putting on a Harold Budd record that’s on Root Strata, called Perhaps. It’s a live record that he did at Cal Arts, just him on solo piano. It’s really beautiful. My partner also finds piano music very calming, so I put it on for her as well. I like listening to the same record over and over. I find it very comforting. There’s no words, it’s just open and spacious.
