Poof

I went to work on Saturday at the hospital, and while I was speaking with a patient I have spoken with a couple of times before, I felt that familiar feeling of the energy suddenly draining out of my body. (I’m sure nothing to do with that particular patient; I just happened to be with her.) I looked at my watch: 1 p.m. exactly.

After work I felt lousy, as usual, and I decided I was done doing the same thing and expecting different results, and that I was going to have to give my two weeks’ notice on Monday morning. Or maybe I decided it was not okay to feel lousy nearly one third of the nights of the week. I wrote it in my calendar, and I wrote “Last day of work” on the page for that day. After that, with relief in sight, I actually felt a bit more jaunty for the rest of the evening.

Sunday morning, the next chaplain called at 8:30 a.m. to take over and we had a great conversation. This was a Clinical Pastoral Education student, one of whom I am particularly fond, though this year’s whole crop is wonderful. He shared in a vulnerable manner about his life, an activity we chaplains highly approve of, and so I decided to tell him about my decision, though I felt a little weird about it, since he is a student and it’s a personnel matter. In part it was because he spoke so openly and I pictured him hearing about my resignation and thinking, “I told Bugwalk all that stuff and she didn’t say one word about what was happening with her?”

So I just told him, including that becoming a board certified chaplain is the accomplishment in my entire life that I am most proud of, and that working in the hospital as a chaplain is the most profound honor in my life, which it is, but that I am sick of feeling horrible two days and nights per week. 

He asked, “How do you feel?”

“Sad.” I was very near tears.

“Is it okay if I feel sad with you?” We felt sad together for a bit.

Then he said maybe what is next is a whole new way of being a chaplain that I can’t right now imagine—maybe my chaplaincy is bursting out of the hospital the way the weeds I pull in Ypsilanti burst out of their narrow cracks (though I guess the analogy ends there, since at that point the weeds are, not to put too fine a point upon it, dead).

That was incredibly helpful. It made a place for the sorrow and the ending, but also opened up an expanse of space in which to feel joy in anticipation of being well rested every day and of a new chapter and new adventures.

I warned the student that I might change my mind about giving notice by Monday morning, which is what happened, mainly because I just could not imagine those words coming out of my mouth. Like, the thing I am proudest of and which means the most to me, I am going to say I don’t want it any more?

I could have just done nothing, but in the end, I asked my boss if I could speak with him, and I told him everything. I told him that while I have made a bit of progress in improving my sleep schedule, it hasn’t been enough. I told him several things I had never told him before: that I need an enormous amount of sleep and that this is why I can never work two days in a row, and about wrestling with the decision about buying the house. I told him I had planned to give two weeks’ notice in that very conversation, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

He said what is great is that I’m a per diem! He said I can simply step away for a time but not give up the job. He mentioned that, after all, I work just two days a week. (And on top of that, have been away fifty percent of the time for more than four years; he didn’t say that.) That was a nicer way of putting it than, “We barely see you, anyway, and will hardly notice if you aren’t here.”

So the upshot was that he took all of my scheduled days off the calendar but I am still an employee of the hospital.

Later in the day it dawned on me that my income had just ended. However, I mainly felt an increasing sense of ease. Because I pretty much spend Monday and Friday getting ready to go to work on Tuesday and Saturday, I suddenly had a wide-open vista before me, four newly free days every single week. I can have lunch with my friend! I can sew a pair of pants! I can call Recology about the collection of e-waste that has been outside my apartment door for weeks and weeks.

I didn’t have to go to sleep early yesterday evening because today was no longer a work day. Instead of the alarm going off at 4:55 a.m., I didn’t set it at all and woke up at 11:30 a.m.

I think I have finally figured out what the most important thing is. It just is not mind over matter when the matter is one’s own body.

I think I just retired.

And after all this agonizing and trying not to agonize, it is suddenly and finally obvious: I will buy the house, and I will move to Michigan. I am kind of patting myself on the back: I knew that eventually things would become clear. I was just hoping it would happen before my siblings took me to court for malfeasance.

I will not be moving right this minute. There are several things I need to do to the house, mainly for the cats, and I have to figure out how to move the cats and move my stuff, and I need time for it to sink in and to plan how to take leave of the things and people I need to say goodbye to, here where I have lived for 45 years.

It is hard to grasp that being a hospital chaplain is over. It is almost ten years to the day since I began my training to be a chaplain. I can easily picture the day I started, the other people who were there, the room we were in, specific things that were said. It seems like it was five minutes ago. The whole ten years, including a solid year spent full-time at UCSF for Clinical Pastoral Education, seems like the merest puff of smoke, barely seen, and then—poof!—gone just like that.

Part of me suspected I would end up staying in San Francisco, which I still might. But part of me knew I would move back to Michigan the day I took a walk with my friend there and put my hands into a cold lake and whispered a wish, “Bring me home. Bring me home.”

Our realtor had lately gotten new comps for the house and found they hadn’t budged from earlier on. I asked her yesterday to go ahead and do her market analysis, which will establish a range for the list price. I plan to go with the number halfway between the top and bottom figures. I must then discuss details with my sisters, sell some stocks, and pay my sisters for their thirds of the house.

The to-do list will be long, but as I recently read somewhere or other, if the task seems daunting, it’s because it hasn’t been broken down into small-enough steps.

I’m kind of looking forward to getting away from the 200 AI billionaires, but there are things I will really miss, I think mainly the sun, and being able to have the window open and have a fresh breeze nearly every day of the year. Neither place has everything; each place has nice things the other doesn’t.