Not Father Mulcahy

by Robert Drake | May 15, 2026 | Uncategorized

What a Chaplain Actually Is, and Why You Might Want One

by Robert Drake

If you grew up watching MAS*H, you have a chaplain in your head already. Father Mulcahy — gentle, earnest, slightly out of place among the surgeons and the chaos, offering prayer and last rites and a kind word in the dark. He is a good man. He is also not what most chaplains are, and perhaps not what you need when the world falls apart — unless, perhaps, you are Catholic.

Let me tell you what a chaplain more often is. I’ll start with two of my chaplaincy failures.

Some years ago my younger sister was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer. Two weeks after her diagnosis, at the beginning of chemo and radiation treatments, she told me — through our youngest sister — that she would rather I not call her anymore. It was, she said, hard enough for her without “Bobby putting me in my grave, already.”

I was stunned, remorseful, and humbled.

I had shown up as a seasoned hospice and palliative care professional. An expert. Her big brother who knew about these things. I had not shown up as someone present to what she actually needed.

It took me two weeks to assure her there would be nothing from me but support — that I would serve her as she needed, not as I thought prudent. She said: “Great. We understand each other.” She was treated, went into remission and for a few years more she survived.

Not long after, I had a palliative care patient with colorectal cancer who had survived two years beyond his prognosis. He and his wife had no doubts about how: “…the power of positive thought and love.” When I visited again and it was clear he had only days left, I asked him in my compassionate but “look death in the face” no-nonsense chaplain fashion: “Are you afraid?”

His face changed to a scowl. With his limited air and energy he said: “What is wrong with you people? I have nothing to be afraid of. This is just my body purging toxins.”

In thirty years together this couple had never raised their voices to each other in anger. They needed to deny death. That denial had kept him alive and them unified in love for two extra precious years. He died peacefully two days later.

I was wrong. They knew what they needed. I had forgotten, in my expertise, to be present to them.

The painful truth is that in spite of my experience with so many deaths and thousands of patient visits, I sometimes forget what I am actually there for. I am not there to tell the truth as I see it. I am there to be present to the truth as they are living it.

I have been either training for or doing this work for nearly two decades. I have sat with the dying in hospice, skilled nursing, and assisted living, in ICUs and emergency rooms, in pediatric oncology wards where the patients are children and the grief and courage are both unspeakable. I have accompanied people choosing medical aid in dying — not escaping life, but refusing to endure intolerable terminal suffering at its end. I have worked in psychiatric forensic units with residents found not guilty by reason of insanity. I have sat in restorative justice circles at San Quentin prison with men serving life sentences where showing weakness is dangerous and hugging is punishable, accompanying them in their own long reckoning with the harm done and the humanity somehow retained.

I am also not very religious.

I am an interfaith chaplain, which means I am trained in the beliefs, practices, and sacred texts of many traditions — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and beyond. I can pray with you if you want prayer. I can sit shiva, honor Ramadan, or simply hold silence with you in whatever way your tradition, your condition, or your grief requires.

But what drives me is not religion. It is philosophy. I bought my first book in fourth grade — the Dialogues of Plato. I have carried it, in one form or another, ever since — Socrates and his unwavering dedication to truth and virtue, unafraid of death. Socrates said, “the trick, my friends, is not avoiding death but avoiding unrighteousness — for that runs faster than death.” I have the Delphic dictum know thyself tattooed in Greek on my arm, not as decoration but as guiding methodology. My early graduate work was in philosophy and conflict resolution, grounded in Kantian respect for persons — the radical, unconditional idea that every human being possesses inherent dignity, regardless of their beliefs, their diagnosis, their history, their position in life, or their condition.

That is what I bring into every room. Not a denomination. A commitment to your worth as a human being.

So what does a chaplain actually do?

The honest answer is: it depends on what you need.

A chaplain is trained to enter any situation — any prognosis, any diagnosis, any social or economic circumstance, any faith tradition or philosophical framework or absence of either — and be present for what that person and their family actually needs. Not what we think they need. Not what would make us comfortable. What they need.

That requires something more demanding than good intentions. It requires knowing yourself — your own beliefs, your own losses, your own background, your gender and race and history and the assumptions you carry because of all of it — well enough to serve rather than impose. A tall white man from a middle class background walks into a room carrying all of that whether he acknowledges it or not, and who he is generates a response from those he meets. I carry the fraught relationships with my dead parents, the experience of growing up in the Midwest. The training is in the acknowledgment. In knowing what you bring so it doesn’t arrive uninvited. This is why we usually do a supervised internship in a clinical setting for at least a year, being forced to do verbatim recreations of patient and family encounters — questioning everything we said and did.

This is why chaplaincy is not interchangeable with good nursing, or skilled therapy or social work, or a caring friend — though all of those matter enormously. A chaplain is specifically trained in the territory where medicine reaches its limits. Where the diagnosis is clear and the prognosis is terminal and the question is no longer what do we do but how do we be. Where the family is shattered and there is nothing to fix and someone needs to stay in the room anyway — vulnerable, feeling, present to the pain without running from it.

We are trained to stay. Without an agenda. Without needing it to resolve. What we strive for is reconciliation of suffering, of a life lived, of loss and of need, of broken dreams and relationships.

Manuel was an ex-con out of San Quentin and Pelican Bay prisons. He had tattoos everywhere. He also had rheumatoid arthritis so severely he was twisted in spine and every limb. He couldn’t bear to be touched. Even sound hurt. He had sepsis. He had liver disease. He was obnoxious to the staff because he was “difficult.”

Manuel was asleep when I arrived. I pulled up my chair quietly and I waited.

For a long time, I waited. I watched him and channeled love to his twisted body and psyche. He awoke and, opening his eyes, said — after a long silent assessment of me — “Who the fuck are you?”

“Who the fuck do you think I am? I’m your hospice chaplain, Bob.”

We hit it off. I served him until he died.

Ministry of caring presence for Manuel? Spiritual leveling, respect, silence, candor.

Near the end of his life, one of my patients confided in me his treason and war crimes. He had carried this burden alone for over half a century. He wasn’t asking for forgiveness. He knew that was between himself and eternity. He needed only the presence of an unjudging human witness.

What he needed was simple caring, compassionate presence.

That is the work. Not preaching. Not saving souls. Not offering answers to questions that have no answers. Just — remaining. Present. Unjudging. Fully human alongside another human at the hardest moment of their life.

Chaplains are more diverse than most people know.

We serve in hospitals, hospices, prisons, military units, disaster response teams, university campuses, and corporate settings. We come from every faith tradition and some from none. There are Buddhist chaplains and humanist chaplains and chaplains who, like me, are better described as philosophers than believers — grounded not in doctrine but in the dignity and worth of every person who sits across from them.

What unites us is not theology. It is a commitment to compassionate presence. To accompaniment. To the belief — or the practice, which is sometimes more honest than belief — that no one should face the hardest moments of their life or their death alone, without someone trained to be there fully, without flinching, without an agenda, without needing them to be other than they are.

If you are facing a serious illness, or accompanying someone who is — call a chaplain. You do not need to be religious. You do not need to be spiritual. You do not need to believe anything in particular. You need what every human being needs at the edge of their life: someone genuinely present. Someone who will not look away. Neither trying to change you nor explain away what you are going through.

If you work in medicine or caregiving — consider what chaplaincy offers your patients and families that the rest of the care team, however skilled and however caring, is not specifically trained to provide. We are not an add-on. We are not the person you call when someone is actively dying and you don’t know what else to do. We are most useful when we arrive early, when there is still time to accompany rather than only to witness. There is good reason that Medicare requires hospice and palliative care teams to include a chaplain alongside the physician, nurse, and social worker.

And if you are considering this work as a vocation — know that it will ask of and utilize all of who you are. Every loss you have carried. Every room you have been afraid to enter. Every question you have sat with that did not resolve. It will ask you to know yourself honestly enough to be present for someone else without making their crisis about you.

It is, in my experience, among the most demanding and most meaningful work a human being can do.

Father Mulcahy was a good man doing his best in impossible circumstances. So are most chaplains, of whatever gender. But the best of us are not defined by our collar or our tradition or our institutional role. We are defined by our willingness to enter the room, to stay without flinching, and to accompany another human being through whatever they are facing — with full respect for who they are, what they believe, and what they need.

That is what a chaplain is.

That is why you might want one.

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 for grief and loss coaching individually and in group retreats. He is the originator of The Death Soiree. He can be reached at Support@DrakeLDD.com. #grief #loss #endoflife #medicalaidindying #chaplaincy

The Continuous Presence of Absence

by Robert Drake | May 5, 2026 | Uncategorized

On Dementia, Witness, and the Grief No One Names

by Robert Drake

There is a particular kind of grief that has no funeral.

No casseroles arrive. No one sends flowers. The person you are grieving is still alive — still breathing, still present in the room, sometimes still laughing at something only they can see. Sometimes crying for no apparent reason. Their hands are the same hands you have held for decades. Their face, in dim light, is still the face you have loved for decades.

But the witness you have loved and lived with for so long is gone.

— — —

In an earlier essay I wrote about what we lose when someone we love dies — that beyond the person themselves, we lose the witness they carried — a validating and authenticating partner in key memories. The one who remembered us young, who held the chapters of our life that no one else inhabited, who could say: “yes, that happened, I was there, I remember you then.” When that person dies, those chapters lose their only other custodian.

Dementia does something more disorienting still.

It takes the witness while leaving the body behind, still breathing.

— — —

I have sat with many families navigating dementia — in hospice, in palliative care, with friends, in the long middle years before hospice becomes relevant. What I observe, consistently, is a grief that is real, constant, and almost completely unsanctioned.

The person is still alive, so your grief is premature, right? So we feel that our grief should be managed, reframed, redirected toward gratitude for the time remaining. The caregiver who breaks down is gently reminded that their loved one is still here.

But that is precisely the problem. They are here. And the witness is not.

The spouse of fifty years sits across the table from someone who no longer remembers their wedding. The adult child visits a parent who no longer knows their name. I visit an old friend in the memory care unit and walk endless hallways, turning around at each barrier and just trying to be of some company — a reminder of what he surely must remember… right? The sibling speaks to someone who once shared their childhood bedroom and now inhabits a present moment with no past attached to it. The shared history — the decades of ordinary days that constituted a life together, that constituted your life as witnessed by this person — is gone from their side of the relationship.

You remember everything. They remember nothing, or fragments, triggered by a song, or a version of the past that no longer includes you in the way you actually existed together.

You are carrying the shared life alone. And they are sitting right there. Just sitting.

— — —

This is what I mean by the continuous presence of absence. It is not the clean break of death, which at least grants us permission to mourn. It is something relentless and without resolution — a grief that must be lived inside the ongoing relationship, a loss that cannot be named as loss because the person has not yet gone. Naming it as loss just doesn’t seem fair. But this is not fair.

Dementia caregivers are among the most isolated people I know. Not because they lack support — many have family, some have professional help — but because the grief they are living with does not have a name that others recognize. They are not yet bereaved. They are not yet widowed or orphaned. The social scripts for loss do not apply to them. And so they carry it alone, often for years, in the company of the very person they are grieving.

That is a particular kind of loneliness. It does not announce itself. It accumulates — daily, in small moments. The moment you reach for a shared memory and find that it is no longer shared. The moment you make a joke that once would have had you both in stitches falls into vacancy, into a vacuum — a void. The moment you realize that the person who knew you best, who held the longest record of who you have been across a lifetime, is no longer able to hold it.

You become, progressively, the last witness to your own shared history.

— — —

There is a clinical term — anticipatory grief — that captures some of this. You are grieving a death that has not yet happened, kind of mourning it forward. This is real, and it is well-documented, and it is still not adequately acknowledged in most caregiving contexts.

But the dementia experience extends beyond anticipatory grief into something I find harder to name. It is not only that you are grieving a future death — a future catastrophic loss. It is that you are experiencing, in the present, the loss of a relationship that has already ended in every meaningful way while the physical presence of the person continues.

I want to call this ontological loneliness — and I mean the word ontological precisely, not as decoration. In philosophical terms, ontology is the study of being — of what it means to exist, to be real, to be present in the world. Ontological loneliness is not the loneliness of circumstance, not the loneliness of an empty house or a silent phone. It is loneliness at the level of existence itself. A solitude that lives not in your calendar schedule or your social life but in the deep structure of your being — in the fact that you are present to someone who can no longer be fully present to you.

We are, at our core, relational creatures. We come into being in relationship — as relationship. We understand ourselves through being known by others. The philosopher Martin Buber spoke of the I-Thou relationship — the encounter between two full subjects, each genuinely present to the other, each capable of being changed by the meeting of hearts or minds. What dementia does, slowly and without mercy, is convert that I-Thou encounter into something closer to I-It. Not because the person with dementia becomes an object — they do not, they remain fully human, fully deserving of dignity and love, and you treat them with that dignity. But the reciprocity that makes genuine encounter possible — the capacity to be witnessed and to witness in return — has dissolved on one side, leaving you alone.

You are present to someone who cannot be fully present to you. You are known by someone who no longer knows you. You reach toward them and something reaches back, but it is no longer the same someone. The mutuality that once constituted the relationship — the shared thread that ran between two people across decades — is now held entirely by you. Sometimes you hold it with your fingertips, sometimes with the entire force of your love and will.

That is what I mean by ontological loneliness. It is not a feeling, exactly, though it produces feelings. It is a condition of being. A structural solitude that no amount of company or support fully addresses, because what is missing is not people — it is the specific person who made you real to yourself in a particular way, and the relationship that once allowed you to be genuinely known, felt, seen, understood, touched.

— — —

For those reading this from inside a dementia caregiving relationship: what you are experiencing is grief. Real grief, and it is not pathological. The fact that your person is still alive does not make it less real. The fact that others cannot see it — cannot recognize what has been lost while the body remains — does not make it less real.

You are mourning your witness. You are mourning the shared history that once lived between two people and now lives only in you. You are mourning the version of yourself that only this person knew — the you from the beginning, from before, from the years that accumulated into a life together.

That grief deserves to be named. It deserves to be witnessed — even if the person who once witnessed you best can no longer do so — can no longer say your name when they look at you.

— — —

For those of us who work in hospice, palliative care, social work, chaplaincy — this is worth holding as we sit with families in the long middle years of dementia. The caregiver who seems fine, who is managing, who says they are okay — may be carrying a grief so continuous and so unsanctioned that they have simply stopped expecting anyone to recognize it. Even when they are not utterly exhausted.

So — ask about it. Name it. Sit with it. Do not rush to reframe it or redirect it toward what remains. The grief is real. The loss is real. The witness is gone, even if the funeral is still years away.

What is being lived is one of the hardest things a human being can be asked to carry: the presence, in absence, of the person they love — the absence of the relationship that person once made possible.

— — —

I have no resolution to offer you. The witness does not return. The shared history does not reconstitute itself. What I have found — in my own life, and in the lives of the people I have been honored to accompany — is that naming this grief is itself a form of care and a form of respect. I have learned that refusing to look away from it, refusing to fold it silently into the general weight of caregiving, is its own form of faithfulness.

To grieve the witness — to name what has been lost while the person lives — is not a betrayal of them. It is an act of honesty about what love costs across a long life, and what it means to remain present to someone who can no longer remain fully present to you.

And sometimes, that is just the only faithfulness left available to us. To remain. To remember. To honor what was shared.

Robert Drake is an interfaith clinical chaplain, end-of-life educator, death doula, and grief counselor with over twenty years of experience in hospice, palliative care, 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 Robert@DrakeLDD.com or Support@DrakeLDD.com.

Death and the Loss of a Witness

by Robert Drake | Apr 28, 2026 | Uncategorized

A Companion Reflection to There Is No Fixing It

by Robert Drake

In a recent essay I wrote about the impossibility of fixing grief, and about presence as the only honest response to another’s loss. This is a companion reflection — another room in the same house. It begins with something I have been sitting with for a very long time, something I rarely hear named in all the conversations about grief and dying.

When someone we love dies, we lose more than them.

We lose a witness — sometimes the only remaining witness to parts of our life.

I have lost nearly twenty people dear to me — both parents, my kid sister, close friends taken too soon and too violently. Each loss has taught me things. But there is one thing they have taught me collectively, through accumulation, that no single loss could have shown me alone. This teaching usually comes only through many losses over many years.

With each death, a portion of my own life became unwitnessed.

My sister was two years younger than me. As children we shared a bedroom. We went to the same YMCA and the same summer camp all summer long for many years. We grew up inside the same world, the same family — five siblings and a father mostly absent. We climbed the same trees and roamed the same fields together. We shared the same particular texture of ordinary days that no one else inhabited quite as we did. She knew the child I was before I knew myself. She held a version of me — early, unformed, becoming — that exists now only in my own memory.

When she died, that version of me lost its only other witness.

We are known, truly known, only by a small number of people over the course of a lifetime. Not known in the casual sense of being recognized or remembered, but known in the deeper sense — witnessed through unique experiences and contexts and understood by no one else. Someone who was there. Someone who remembers who you were before you became who you are. Someone who can say: yes, that happened, I was there, I remember you then.

When that special person dies, the chapters of your life they carried die with them. Not entirely — you carry them too. But they lose their external confirmation. They become, in a sense, unverifiable. A private archive with only one remaining custodian.

This is not the same as missing someone, though you miss them too. It is something quieter and more disorienting. A portion of your own life has become suddenly unwitnessed and unanchored. And you may not find language for that feeling for a long time, if ever.

What I have come to understand, through the accumulation of nearly twenty close, personal losses, is that this is also a story about loneliness.

Not the loneliness of an empty house or a silent phone. Something structural, certainly spiritual. Something that builds slowly, loss by loss, over the years.

Each death steals a witness. Over time, more and more of your life exists only inside you, held by no other living person. Whole eras of who you were — the young person, the one still becoming, the one before the losses began, or eras in our older, still evolving lives — grow increasingly solitary. The people who knew you then, who were present in those rooms, those years, those ordinary days that turned out to matter more than anyone knew at the time — they are gone. And with them goes the shared reality of who you were.

I am seventy-two years old. I have outlived both my parents, my sister, and nearly twenty dear friends. There are chapters of my life now that exist only in my own memory. No one else remembers those times with me. No one else can confirm them, inhabit them, laugh or grieve over them alongside me. I am, for long stretches of my own history, the last witness standing.

That is a particular kind of loneliness. It does not announce itself dramatically. It accumulates. And it is one of the least named dimensions of a life lived long enough to love many and lose many.

No one but Kirk was with me when I drove my Porsche off the mountainside into the snow from an icy curve in Bear Valley. No one but Colin would remember looking at each other during the psychedelic years of the seventies and understanding what I was seeing or thinking without having to speak it. No one but Joe would know the icy cold and deep peace of the early fishing morning in the White Mountains of Arizona. No one but Mom would remember me and understand my reasons for hitchhiking through Mexico or wanting to study Arabic after camping with the Bedouin. No one but Carol would remember me telling her, clinging to a limb below me, to climb back down from the tree I was already climbing or I would have to pee on her — she did not climb down. No one but Richard would remember seeing the Little People deep in the desert of Death Valley. Only Rod could speak of my nature as a young man and his roommate in Bloomington as a young philosopher. Dad alone would know my pride catching my first fish. And my first wife alone knew me as a brand new father — an imperfect one, for sure — but that is part of the reality that seems now a little less real.

For those of us who work in end-of-life care — in hospice, in palliative medicine, in social work and chaplaincy — this is worth holding as we sit with the dying and the bereaved. When someone is losing a spouse of fifty years, or a lifelong friend, or a sibling who shared their childhood, they are not only losing the relationship. They are losing the person who remembered them young — who remembered them when. Who knew the story from the beginning. Who held the evidence of a life lived.

That is an enormity that deserves to be named, not folded silently into the general weight of grief. It is something to be grieved in its own right — named honestly as loneliness.

And there is this, too, for those of us in this work: even our patients take something of us with them when they die. The ones we have sat with for months, laughed and cried with, accompanied through their final season — they knew us in a particular way that no one else did. They witnessed us in our caring, in our presence, in our most human moments alongside them. When they die, that witness goes too. We carry our patients’ losses. We rarely speak of the losses they carry of us.

For the bereaved reading this: if your loss has left you feeling not only bereft but somehow less real — less confirmed in your own history — that is not confusion or self-absorption. That is one of the truest things about grief, and one of the least spoken.

You are not only mourning them. You are mourning the you that only they could see — that only they knew.

There is no resolution to offer. The witness does not return. The loneliness of outliving them does not fully resolve either — it becomes, over time, part of the landscape you inhabit.

What I have found is that naming it matters. That sitting with this particular grief — the grief of the unwitnessed self — without flinching from it or rushing past it, is its own form of faithfulness. To them. To yourself. To the reality of what was shared and what has been lost.

Grief is not pathological. It is the natural cost of having been witnessed, and of having witnessed in return. It is the price of having been known. And then of having lost.

And the loneliness that accumulates as the witnesses go — that is not a malfunction either. It is what love looks like across a long life. It is what it means to have been present, truly present, to the people who made you who you are.

There is no fixing that. There is only the willingness to carry it honestly — and to remain, as faithfully as we can, a witness to those who can no longer witness with us.

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.

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

by Robert Drake | 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 Robert Drake | Mar 12, 2026 | Uncategorized