There Is No Fixing It: On Presence, Loss, and the Courage to Stay

by | Apr 1, 2026 | Uncategorized

by Robert Drake

I have sat with the dying for many years. In pediatric oncology units, in ICUs, in hospice rooms, at bedsides where medical aid in dying was chosen not as an escape from life but as a refusal to endure intolerable suffering at its end. I have accompanied people through the last hours of their lives, and I have accompanied the people who loved them through what came after.

I have also buried both my parents. I lost my sister — two years younger than me, someone who grew up inside the same world I did and sharing the same bedroom and summer camp. I have lost friends taken too soon and too violently, in ways that made no sense then and make no sense now.

I tell you this not to establish my credentials. I tell you because what I have to say comes from inside the experience of loss, not from above it or outside the dying rooms.

There are moments in this work — and in grief itself — when everything you thought you knew about comfort becomes useless to mitigate the pain. When the usual language fails entirely. When every instinct to help, to explain, to offer meaning, to say something — anything — that might ease the unbearable weight of what another person is carrying, loved one or patient, reveals itself as a “reaching away” from them rather than toward them.

I think of my nephew and his wife, who lost their baby girl one month after she was born.

There is no explaining that. There is no comfort to be given, nor any to be had. There is nothing one can say to make things better, nor should one try, because there just is no making it better. There is no making it easier. There is no fixing it.

And the moment we accept that powerlessness — really accept it, not as defeat but as truth — something shifts. We stop “performing” presence and begin actually offering it.

Nicholas Wolterstorff lost his son Eric to a climbing accident at twenty-five. In Lament for a Son, he did something rare: he wrote from inside the grief without reaching for resolution. Without tidying it into some kind, any kind of, meaning. He sat in the wound and stayed there, and in doing so he created one of the most honest documents of catastrophic loss I know.

What Wolterstorff understood, and what decades of sitting with hundreds of the sick, shattered, dying and bereaved has taught me, is that the impulse to comfort is often really the impulse to escape from their pain. To escape the discomfort of witnessing suffering we cannot remedy or help with. To escape our own mortality, which every grieving room holds up like a fractured mirror. To escape the terrible silence that falls when there is simply nothing adequate to say.

But that silence is not empty. It is where presence can live.

The theological tradition I draw from — panentheism, process theology, the mystical strands of Christianity, Buddhism and beyond — does not offer a God who stands outside suffering and permits it for reasons we cannot yet understand. The divine, as I have come to hold it, is not separate from the process of reality but constitutive of reality. Including the violence and the tragedy and the losses that arrive without warning and without reason. Inclusive of the messiness and chaos of reality. All of it — including this. Including the baby who lived one month and her parents who will grieve for the rest of their lives as they strive every day to remain here with those others who love them and rely on them.

This is not a comfortable theology. It does not promise that things will be redeemed or even reconciled, or that we will understand later, or that there is even a plan. It says instead that the ground of being does not abandon the process even in its most catastrophic expressions. That presence — bare, undefended, ever-unexplaining presence — is itself a participation in something real and sacred.

There is a notion the Christian mystics called kenosis: self-emptying. The willingness to be hollowed out rather than armored. To release the need to fix, to explain, to make meaning — and to simply remain — to continue to be.

Your grief is not pathological. It is a natural and normal response to loss.

The medicalization of grief — the clinical frameworks, the staged models, the diagnostic criteria that now classify prolonged grief as a disorder — can quietly communicate that grief is something to be treated, managed, moved through on a schedule, resolved. That if you are still carrying your loss after a certain number of months, something has gone wrong with you.

Nothing has gone wrong with you. You are loving someone who is no longer here. That is not a malfunction. That is what love looks like when it has nowhere left to go.

For those who work in medicine, in chaplaincy, in psychology or social work, in any of the caring professions that place us alongside suffering: we were trained to assess and then to intervene. To diagnose, to treat, to counsel, to resolve. Those skills matter enormously. But there are rooms where they do not apply. There are moments when the most skilled thing we can do is put down our tools and simply be there. Not as professionals. As human beings who are also, beneath all our training, mortal.

For those reading this from inside your own grief: you do not need to be fixed. Your loss is not a problem to be solved. The people who love you cannot take it from you, and the ones who try — however kindly — are, in their way, unintentionally leaving you alone with it. What you need, and what you deserve, is someone who can stay. Who can be present to the reality of what you are carrying without flinching away from it.

That is the hardest gift to give. It is also the one that finally matters.

Perspective, attachment, aversion. These are the hinges on which suffering turns — not because naming them dissolves the grief, but because they illuminate something about how we relate to what we cannot control and cannot keep. We suffer in part because we love and then lose what we have loved. We suffer in part because we grip and try to hold fast to a reality we can’t bear to release. And we suffer in part because we cannot bear to look directly at the fact that everything we love is impermanent.

I am not suggesting we should love less. I am suggesting that the willingness to stay present to loss — our own and others’ — without turning away, without reaching for explanations that do not exist, is itself a form of love. Perhaps the deepest form.

There is no fixing it. There is only the courage to remain.

Robert Drake is a clinical interfaith chaplain, death doula, eco-theologian, mediator and end-of-life educator with nearly twenty years of experience in hospice, palliative care, psychiatric, pediatric oncology, emergency medicine and medical aid in dying. He serves as volunteer Director of Spiritual Care Education for the Academy of Aid in Dying Medicine and works with individuals and families throughout the Pacific Northwest through Drake Living & Dying Design. He can be reached at Support@DrakeLDD.com.

Compassion as the Ground: What the Anthropic-Pentagon Standoff Teaches Us About AI, Power, and What We Owe Each Other

by | Mar 12, 2026 | Uncategorized

In my years as a clinical chaplain, I have heard it many times.

A teenage child at a bedside. A sibling gripping the rail. A partner pressed against the wall as if the wall might hold them up. Wailing. Crying.

“No! This can’t be happening! This can’t be real!”

That cry — that rupture between the world as it was and the world as it suddenly is — is where my work lives. I have been the one who stays in the room when the decision-makers have moved on. I have been present at the precise moment when all abstraction fails, when policy and procedure and clinical efficiency dissolve, and what remains is a human being who cannot yet inhabit the reality being handed to them.

I have come to believe that this moment — this shattering instant — is the most important thing missing from our public conversations about artificial intelligence.

Because somewhere, someday, people will stand in rooms and cry those words about decisions made by autonomous systems that felt nothing, mourned nothing, and answered to no one. And we are building those systems right now, in the choices we make about what values to embed, what lines to hold, what we are willing to sell.

Which brings me to what happened last week.

A Line Held at Real Cost

Anthropic — the company that makes the AI model Claude — walked away from a $200 million Pentagon contract rather than remove two specific protections from its agreement: a prohibition on using its technology for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens, and a prohibition on powering fully autonomous weapons systems. The current administration responded by ordering all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s tools and designating the company a “supply chain risk to national security” — a classification previously reserved for companies connected to foreign adversaries.

Within hours, Claude hit number one on the App Store.

Something in our citizenry recognized what had happened, even if the political framing tried to obscure it. A company had been punished for insisting that its technology not be used to surveil citizens or kill people without human accountability. People responded — not with indifference, but with something that looked briefly like solidarity.

This is not, at its core, a story about corporate strategy or political brinkmanship. It is a story about witness. About whether anyone in the governing rooms or our living rooms will say: wait — do we understand what we are doing here, and to whom?

Compassion Is Not Weakness

The dominant framing in defense and technology circles is that compassion is a luxury — something we can afford in peacetime, in clinical settings, in philosophy seminars, but not in the serious business of national security. Efficiency, strategic advantage, deterrence: these are the languages of power. Compassion, in this framing, is naive.

I want to push back on that with everything I have — everything I am.

Remaining present to suffering without flinching, holding the weight of another person’s mortality without deflecting or dissociating into abstraction, insisting on the irreducible dignity of a life even when the systems around you are urging efficiency — this is not weakness. This is the hardest work there is. And it is the work that tells the truth about what is actually at stake.

The framing of compassion as weakness serves a purpose. It serves those who benefit from its absence. If you can convince enough people that care is naive, that the suffering of others is their own problem, or that the other is fundamentally, morally different from you — you have cleared the field for a politics of pure domination. That is not a neutral observation about efficacy. It is a power move.

What Gets Lost When No One Is in the Room

Autonomous weapons ask us to delegate life-and-death decisions to systems that have never suffered, never grieved, never had to live with what they did, and never will suffer or grieve their actions — their choices made without moral reflection. There is no moral weight in a machine. There is no conscience that will wake at 3am. There is no one to hold accountable in the way that accountability actually functions — through a person who must face what they have done and reckon with it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that we should conduct every victory also as a funeral. He understood that the taking of a life — even in war, even with justification — is never purely triumph. Something is always lost. Something must be mourned. That capacity for mourning, that insistence on keeping the face of the other in view, is not a weakness in a soldier or a commander. It is what separates war from massacre. It is what separates us from moral oblivion.

An autonomous weapons system cannot mourn. It cannot be haunted. It cannot refuse because something in it recognizes the humanity of the person in its laser sights. We are being asked to treat that incapacity as a feature. I believe it is a catastrophic loss — one that will one day produce rooms full of people crying: this can’t be real. And finding no one to answer.

The Ones Who Will Pay

When I think about AI weaponized toward political ends, I do not think first in abstractions. I think about children. I think about women. I think about ecosystems. I think about communities that are simply trying to survive — that have no seat at the table where these decisions are made, and that will absorb the consequences.

This is not accidental. It is structural. The pattern of who pays for the decisions of the powerful — the regular people — is one of the most consistent facts of human history. AI does not change this pattern. At the scales AI enables, it accelerates and amplifies it.

My framework is panentheist and eco-theological: the divine is not above or outside the natural world but woven through it. Ecological destruction is not collateral damage — it is, potentially, irreversible desecration. The suffering of a child, or an entire school full of children in a conflict zone, the death of a watershed, the silencing of a species for eternity — these are not separate concerns. They are one concern. The web of relation that constitutes moral and physical existence is being torn, and we are being asked to accelerate the tearing in the name of national security.

No One Is an Island

John Donne wrote this four centuries ago, and we keep forgetting it:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

— John Donne, Meditation XVII, 1624

This is not sentiment. It is ontology — the nature of our existence as beings. The self is not a fortress. Other is I. I is other. We all suffer. We all grieve the loss of someone or something we love. We all die. We need each other in ways that our individualist frameworks cannot fully account for. The so-called tragedy of the commons is a fallacy rooted in the impoverished assumption that self-interest is the only ground of human motivation. But it is not. Love is also a ground. Compassion is also a ground. The impulse toward the good of the whole is also a ground — and it is ancient, and it is persistent, and it refuses, and will continue to refuse, to be argued away.

The principles of restorative justice rest on exactly this recognition: that harm ruptures relationship, and that the work of justice is repair — not punishment, not erasure, but the painstaking recognition of responsibility and relational reconstruction of the bonds that make community possible. Society ought not be a zero-sum game. We are embedded in one another. What we do to the other, we do to our environment and we do to ourselves.

AI trained on the full breadth of human expression — our wisdom and our brutality, our compassion and our cruelty — will reflect back what we have put into it. What we embed in these systems now, at this early and consequential moment, matters beyond calculation. The values baked into the AI architecture, the ethical and moral lines held or abandoned, the frameworks that shape what these systems are permitted to do — these are not merely technical decisions. They are moral ones. They are, in the deepest sense, spiritual ones.

A Hope That Has Been Tested

I am not without fear. I fear the use of AI as a force multiplier for political violence and ecological destruction. I fear the acceleration of suffering among those who are already and increasingly most vulnerable. I fear the removal of human witness — human presence, human accountability — from decisions that will determine whether life flourishes or is diminished.

But I also carry hope. Not naive hope — hope that has been tested in ICUs and emergency rooms, pediatric and psychiatric wards and disaster zones and hospice rooms at bedside. Hope that knows the horrific costs of decisions. Hope that has stood in rooms where people could not yet believe what was real, and chosen to remain present anyway.

What happened last week with Anthropic was small, and it was significant. A company held a line that cost it something real. The public responded with something that looked, briefly, like solidarity. These are not insignificant. They are the kinds of moments that, accumulated over time, become the record of whether a civilization kept its conscience or sold it. Whether it kept its humanity or lost it.

The question before us — before every person who touches these technologies, builds them, deploys them, or simply lives in a world they are reshaping — is whether compassion will be a driver or an afterthought. Whether the faces of children, of ecosystems, of those who are simply trying to survive, will remain in view as these decisions get made. If compassion is an afterthought, it will come too late.

Whether, when the moment comes and someone cries out — this can’t be happening, this can’t be real — there will be someone with a conscience in the room to answer.

Donne knew. Any person’s diminishment diminishes us all. We have always known this. We need to remember it now, urgently, at scale.

All my relations.

Robert Drake is a clinical chaplain, eco-theologian, grief and spiritual care counselor, and end-of-life educator based at Farm53 Flowers in Shelton, Washington. He holds Master’s degrees in Conflict Resolution and Divinity/Theology, and serves as volunteer Director of Spiritual Care Education for the Academy of Aid in Dying Medicine. He can be reached at Support@DrakeLDD.com or at drakeldd.com.