Sterling’s Song
“What was your favorite part about being in a rock band?” I asked Sterling during our initial visit after his admission to hospice care. He was thin and had a reedy voice. He was young when he came to us, barely past middle age, but he had been hard on his body in those years. After several moments of solemn thought, he gave a small smirk and a sideward glance. “The women,” he replied. We both started laughing.
I would grow to be endeared by Sterling’s humor, caring nature, and honesty in the face of death. Sterling was not a particularly religious person, holding no particular allegiances to any established faith. We had very little personally in common, but sometimes you just click with someone.
Sterling’s decline was steady and difficult. He often struggled with feeling like a burden and a failure. He struggled to feel that God could ever love him. He became increasingly confused and fearful, spending the whole of our visits weeping and seeking assurance that God would forgive him. He was never clear about what he felt he needed forgiveness for. Eventually, he grew so confused that he would forget our previous conversations between visits. We would often find ourselves having the same conversations over and over again. Weep, pray, rest, repeat. One visit, talking was too difficult, his mind too muddled, and tears were all he had left to offer.
Though we had little in common, Sterling and I both played guitar. I don’t usually play for patients. It’s not that I’m against it, but I know that to be a pastor and carry a guitar in Texas is to risk being pulled into any number of impromptu musical worship gatherings. But Sterling was never interested in Hillsong or hymns. He had several guitars around his room, including an old Stratocaster and a Martin acoustic. During one of our more difficult visits, I was struggling to connect with him, to soothe his fear. So, despite my usual hesitation, I picked up his acoustic, tuned it, and played for him. I played “Flow” by Shawn James, a song about taking life as it comes and hopefully finding meaning in it. It felt apt and seemed good for Sterling. He was rapt and tearful and I could see him visibly relax. Afterwards, he looked at me and said with great conviction, “I need to write a song.” Handing him my notepad, he began to write. It was clear almost immediately that he could no longer manage this. He lost focus, struggled to hold the pen, and after several minutes of concerted effort managed less than one line of unintelligible gibberish, forgetting what he had set out to do in the first place. Sterling lingered in these days longer than we hoped he would and, though our visits brought him great comfort, his death was difficult.
It’s hard not to wonder about how much of an impact you can have with someone whose mental capacity is waning. For all the hours I spent with him before his death, I can’t guarantee Sterling remembered feeling loved by God. I can’t guarantee he felt more at peace or less alone, at least not for long. What I do know is how certain I was in those moments that God loved him. I know this in part because I loved him. I still have the small slip of paper with his unintelligible lyrics on it over a year after his death. It is a small memento mori that I have kept with me for every visit with every patient since. There is not a single legible word. I will never know what he intended by it. But, it was meaningful to Sterling, and therefore it is meaningful to me.
Sterling embodied several hard-won lessons of my being a hospice chaplain. Patients and families are my teachers more so than I am theirs. Connection and meaning can transcend language and understanding. The love of God transcends any capacity we have to remember or accept it. Thank God for that. Holding space where those lessons can thrive is a great and terrible calling. May grace abound for those so called.
