Field Notes from A Chaplain: The Herbal Chaplain and the birth of Aurelia Grove

My first paid job was working at a vet clinic in Virginia. I was hired as an assistant to clean the cages and walk the dogs. Perhaps because of some promise I showed or more likely the economics of private veterinary medicine in the 1990s, it wasn’t long before the roles of my position expanded. Within a year, I was helping with appointments, administering fluids on my own, assisting with surgeries and compassionate end of life care.

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So at the tender age of 15, I began a journey of accompaniment with the dying and the bereaved at the vet clinic.  While there was so much I didn’t understand at that time, even then, it felt like a privilege to be present with the sacred moment of goodbye for humans and their beloved animal companions.

While I didn't quite have the language to articulate the depth of what I was experiencing, the love was clear in the grief that poured out as people said goodbye to their beloved animals. Later that year, a good friend of mine suddenly passed away. He was with his dear friend Danny who unsuccessfully tried to save him with CPR.  In the months after death, Danny questioned over and over if he had done the right thing and maybe his friend would have lived if he had done something differently.

Danny’s grief and second guessing of everything that happened that day alongside navigating my own waters of grief, revealed within us both the very human response of attempting to exert some control over mortality.  For me that looked like a decision that I would do all that I could to prevent finding myself in a situation where I didn’t know what to do if someone I loved was in a medical emergency or a trauma. So I enrolled in a class at a vocational school through my public high school and became certified as an EMT.  The summer after my senior year in high school I briefly ran with a crew in suburban Virginia.

When I think about the ways that I have been called to the gates of life and death in this lifetime, I often come back to those early acute and powerful encounters with the arbitrary and bewildering nature of death and the complex landscape of grief that surrounds it.

Some years later, in the early 2000s, I was working as a faith based community organizer and serving in leadership in my spiritual community, when my dear friend Valentina suddenly began having seizures. She was taken to the hospital and they were unable to get the seizures under control. So in an attempt to ease the misfirings in her brain, she was placed in a medically induced coma in the ICU.  The days passed to weeks and they were unable to understand why she was seizing and at some point became unable to get her out of the coma. During her hospitalization, I found myself in a support role for her mother and her partner and all of our friends. Leveraging my over a decade of ritual leadership experience, I intuitively began organizing healing rituals to sustain us through the difficult journey of having a loved one in the ICU with an unknown prognosis.

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Somewhere at Valentina’s bedside, emerged a feeling that I was in the midst of the work my soul had come here to do.  Clarity came to me late one night, as I was leaving the hospital after working a long shift and then spending the night at the bedside with her sedated body.  As the elevator doors swung open on the 7th floor of the hospital, I found myself face to face with a Franciscan monk, in full clerical attire; a brown hooded robe and rope.  In my exhausted stupor, this monk seemed almost comically out of place to me and I wondered if he was some sort of fatigue induced hallucination. I asked him what he was doing in the hospital in part just to see if he was in fact real. Confirming his embodiment, he responded with what I now know was his “chaplain elevator speech”: a description of his role as a chaplain explaining that he was there to provide spiritual and emotional support for patients and families.  

I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember the swish of his brown robe against the floor as he stepped off the elevator followed by the ding of the doors as they were closing, The elevator bell snapping me out of my confused stupor and into the thought, “why has he not come to visit us?”

My mind searched for answers. Is it because Valentina is an immigrant? Is it because she is queer? And then the question of How would this whole terrifying experience be different if we had someone who could meet us spiritually supporting us through this?

That was the moment that seeded my call to chaplaincy and clinical spiritual care. Slowly I began to explore the call. I applied to seminary, got into a progressive Unitarian Universalist Seminary, then decided I was too much of a witchy queer weirdo to pursue seminary education and that I could fulfill my calling through a clinical practice of herbalism. And so I became a certified herbalist and began practicing as an herbalist in 2010 but the idea of chaplaincy kept gnawing at me despite my stepping into service with plant healing. 

Almost on a whim, I applied to a different seminary and not only was accepted, I was awarded a prestigious scholarship that enabled me to finance seminary education. I began the pursuit of chaplaincy. I started a Chaplaincy internship in my second year of seminary and deepened my path in ministry through studies of interfaith ministry and ordination as an Interfaith Minister. 

I felt clear in my calling - to weave together care, ritual, community and spiritual practice in ways that help people navigate life’s thresholds authentically and less alone. For many years I was able to answer this call through my role as the Director of Sojourn Chaplaincy, the spiritual care department at the San Francisco General Hospital. I had both the opportunity to live this vision through service of patients and staff at the hospital but also to train and teach community leaders, clergy and spiritual leaders in providing loving and supportive clinical spiritual care.

Spiritual Care in the early pandemic

However, in 2020, when the pandemic hit, everything I thought I knew about death and accompaniment was flipped over. Suddenly, throughout medicine, we were facing circumstances where patients were forced to die alone and in isolation. Our program completely lost its volunteers and interns and we became a much smaller program. My clinical work became focused largely on the sickest COVID patients and caring for the staff. Families were unable to say goodbye to their loved ones. My heart broke over and over as so many of the fundamental needs of the dying were not able to be met.

And so, like many chaplains, I was forced to be creative in coming up with ways to try to meet these needs, either remotely doing ritual over FaceTime and zoom, providing anointing and other end of life rituals in a way that didn't put the living at risk. Having worked with immigrant communities and communities impacted by the carceral system for most of my professional life and all of my path of chaplaincy, creating containers of connection across great distances was not unfamiliar.  However, how this all applied in the context of so many people on the brink of death, distressed healthcare staff all around and the greater restrictions of the time added thick layers to the challenges.

It was a profoundly transformative time that pushed me beyond my limits of centered practice in medicine but through these challenges something critical emerged in perfect clarity. The spiritual and very human need for community and connection at the end of life is non-negotiable. All humans deserve to have access to the connection and care that they want and need at the end of their life. 

After accompanying thousands of people and their loved ones at the end of their lives and providing ritual support to the dying, I have learned so much from the people I have served.  After navigating the challenges of the borders and bars that keep humans apart during some of the most tender and precious times of life and finding ways to weave threads of connection when physical interaction is not allowed, I’ve come to understand that the needs of the dying, the regrets of the dying, and the grief of the dying can be held by the fabric of love that has been woven throughout a lifetime - regardless of circumstances.  I’ve come to see the ways that the living can support the dying in wrapping that fabric of love around the person who is dying in all kinds of circumstances of isolation and separation the dying person may be facing. 

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I've seen “good death” and I've seen “bad death”. I’ve seen traumatic death and I've seen beautiful, connected, and loving death. After all this death, what's become clear to me is how our souls long for connection and meaning at the end of our lives. After years of dedicating my life in service of the dying and their bereaved, it’s become clear to me how important it is that we are well supported in the journey of our final years, months, weeks and days.  I’ve seen what kind of a difference that support can have in allowing for a death that’s grounded in peace, resolution, meaning, and connection.

These are the roots of my writing and teaching  as the Herbal Chaplain and the seeds of practice with Aurelia Grove, a place where you can come to be in connection, and also to be in loving presence of the unique needs and challenges that you face as you approach the later and final parts of life. Aurelia Grove is also a place where we can come together in community to explore our mortality and prepare for the only thing that is promised to us in this life. Death is the sacred promise of life. Aurelia Grove is a place to come together in connection and uncover the unique ways that we will be with that sacred promise.

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Death is not something to be feared. Death is the only promise that is given when we come into this world. It we turn towards the promise of death, we can approach the gates of death in connection with the sacredness of the journey of dying. If we approach the end of our lives with our eyes open, we can also approach these gates in a sacred relationship with the promise of life. 

So come, step into Aurelia Grove with me.

Let us dream together of that which is possible when we don’t let fear be the guide.

Let us dream together of that which is possible when we are present with the soul’s healing journey that we are in need of in this life.

Let us dream together of that which is possible when we step into the unknown.

Remembering that just as your body knew exactly how to take its first breath, it also knows how to release the last. 

Guided by the confidence that each soul was born prepared for the end.

Trusting that love can carry you across the most holy of thresholds and into the great mystery of what lies beyond this life. 

St. Ciaran’s bed and holy well in Donegal, Ireland, A sacred site for my ancestors from Donegal.