I do not know from whence I mustered the ability to tell that horrible truth. In retrospect, I imagine that my son would have felt betrayed (ironically) had I known but not been the one to tell him. I imagine that I would have felt so had our roles had been reversed.

I think—I do not know—that if I were Mr. Bakari’s chaplain I might have responded to his desperate statement, “I can’t tell her that,” in this way: “Oh! Such impossibly terrible news to bear. My heart breaks for your daughter and you. I wonder who is better able or could be trusted more than you, her father, to tell her.” Or, “If your were to trade places with Bahia, who would you trust most?”

In a professional experience (as if the professional is not personal) that preceded my wife’s death by many years, I was a neonatologist caring for an infant that had died suddenly and unexpectedly in the early hours of the very morning he was to be discharged home with his mother. I had to go to the mother’s room, awaken her from a sound sleep, introduce myself, and reveal that her precious newborn child was now dead.

After learning the child’s first name from my nurse colleague, I walked toward the mother’s room wanting to awaken from a bad dream, wanting the child’s private pediatrician to appear on the scene . . . wanting the child’s father to be there already. Perhaps I could tell him, “man to man,” what I surely could not tell his wife. “Dear God,” I prayed, please do not leave this cruel deed to me!”

I awakened this sleeping mother as gently as I could, held her hand in mine, told her my name, identified myself as a pediatrician, and said, “I am so very, very sorry to tell you that your precious son has died.” To this day I convince myself that she knew that something dreadful had happened before I spoke a word. Not only might she have experienced resonance with my own felt despair, why else would a stranger dressed in surgical scrubs arouse her from a peaceful sleep at that ungodly hour?
These things I do know. First, this remarkably courageous woman mobilized the wisdom and strength to call her husband and, as I would do years later with my son, told him to come to the hospital as soon as he could because their son was gravely ill. I stayed with her as she wept inconsolably. And when her husband arrived I stood witness to the two of them bearing together an unbearable grief. Second, I also know that something about my presence if not my truth-telling moved these parents to consult me about the well-being of the child they gave birth to nearly one year later. Though I had been a harbinger of doom earlier, with their new child and their new hope they could still trust me.

For either my personal or professional experience I cannot imagine that truth-telling could be any less traumatic. Truth is what it is. It is easy to imagine that someone else could have told my son or my patient that which they had every right to know—someone very, very dear to them was now dead. So, for me the question is not whether they ought to be told. Rather, the question is by whom, and when?

How would we, as chaplains, have served Bahia, her father, or her care providers in the midst of their travail?
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Ronald David is a pediatrician, Episcopal priest, chaplain, and recently certified Diplomate in CPSP. As a supervisor in clinical pastoral education at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles, California, he experiences chaplaincy as the perfect melding of clinical theology and medicine. Troubled by the distortions and misunderstandings of theological concepts as represented in medical science and care, Ronald is writing a book on the relationship between health, spirituality, and religion.

To contact Dr. Roland, click here.