Tag: healthcare

Preorder My New Book, As Long As You Need: Permission to Grieve

Book title and cover reveal:

• As Long As You Need: Permission to Grieve •

You can now preorder 🙌

AsLongAsYouNeedBook.com

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My book releases on April 16th, 2024.

It’s about grief.

I talk about my hospital chaplain work and multiple dimensions of grief, such as loss of:

/ dreams / mental health / autonomy / community / self-worth after abuse /

I dismantle myths about grief,

share stories from the hospital,

and share what I learned and unlearned from sitting with hundreds of patients.

And it is partially a memoir of my own grief: the death of my friend John, witnessing my wife survive PPD, witnessing the hardest losses on the frontlines, the loss of my faith (and coming back to it, sort of), and confronting my own history of trauma through EMDR. ❤️‍🩹

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Second to last photo is my co-author. I always had an open door policy when I was writing. Any time she dropped in, I paused and spent time with her. She’d watch me write or ask me to read it to her or just vibe to the lo-fi. She now calls lo-fi “daddy’s writing music.”

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Last photo is me after recording some of the audiobook. I didn’t get to narrate my last one (I was told I failed the audition). My new publisher assured me from the start that I’d get to record for this one. Very glad and grateful and honored to be reading my book for you. 🎙️

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This book could not have been written without you. Online family. Your kindness, comments, messages, stories, and feedback were my strength as I took on this emotionally challenging work.

I’ll be doing a few readings randomly in April and May. Would love to meet you. 🫶

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A special thank you to Faith M Karimi, CNN digital senior writer, for writing the article about me and my work. I got a lot of interest in a book after the article. From phone calls at the hospital to hundreds of messages, I heard from so many sharing their grief stories. I’m reminded that even when it seems like grief is a scary topic, many of us really do want to talk about loss, death, and dying. In this very tough space, I hope to meet you there.

— J.S.

Everything I’ve Seen Is Almost Too Much


This is my face near the end of a chaplain shift at the hospital.

I entered chaplaincy almost six years ago. I have loved every second of it. And every second of it has been brutally, insanely, impossibly hard.

I’ve sat with thousands of patients now. So many who told me their final words, secrets, regrets, confessions. At their deathbeds, watching their heart rate dwindle down to single digits. Their last breath on earth.

I have seen terrible things. There are sounds a human can make which no human ever should. Pure agony. Sometimes grief. Other times relief.

Something I haven’t talked about much is that during my year long residency, I lost my faith. I reverted back to atheism for a long while. I’ve shared before that my faith has always been skeptical, cautious, doubting every single day. I’m like one of those Israelites who probably ran screaming through the Red Sea, not sure if the walls of water would hold up all the way. In the hospital, I had seen too much. The waters crashed down. All this suffering, I couldn’t comprehend a god who cared about this random, haphazard, utterly chaotic madness. No pattern. No reason. Babies born to die? An entire family burned down in their sleep? A roof can just fall on a child’s head? I found it hard to believe in a god at beside. I also found it hard not to believe, either.

Eventually I did come back around. But different than before. The walls of my faith had broken, rebuilt, expanded. I found out miracles were not just healing, but a story finally being told, a family staying night after night, a covid patient rolled to a balcony above their family to say one last goodbye, a baby after weeks in a box being able to breathe on her own.

Today I am one year older. And I feel I have lived a thousand lifetimes. I have died a thousand lifetimes. I’m glad to do so. To be in the shadow of my patients, to be their cheerleader and sidekick, a tiny lighthouse in the dark of the sea: there is no higher honor than for me to cheer on my patients, who are the hero of their stories. I am but a footnote. I am grateful to be one.

I wrote a book to honor my patients, and I can only hope I did some justice to their voices.

— J.S.

Successfully Vaccinated: Covid Vaccine Journey, Dose 1 and 2

I was incredibly lucky and privileged to receive the covid vaccine from the hospital where I work. I’ve posted my journey through the vaccines, including the side effects and how it went.

The first dose had one sudden side effect which passed quickly.
The second dose had an unexpected side effect which also passed quickly.
It has now been nearly two weeks since my second dose, and there are no side effects at all.
Please feel free to ask me anything.



Loving “Them.”

The nurse told me that the patient Willard had taken a bite out of another nurse. He had swung at one of the doctors and thrown urine at a surgeon. Willard couldn’t walk; he kept demanding to go home. “Get me a wheelchair, I’ll flop in and ride over you people.” The staff kept trying to get him to stay, to get treated, despite his violent non-compliance, because nurses and doctors have the guts to look past that stuff.

The staff called for a chaplain, and I was the lucky one. I walked in and saw the patient had a tattoo of a swastika on his hand enclosed in a heart.

My eyes locked on the swastika first. The symbol held a terrible place in my memory: when I was a kid, someone had spray-painted a red swastika next to the front door of my dad’s business. Though my dad had tried to paint over it, I could still see it on hot summer days, a scar on the wall and a scar in my head, a mad throbbing declaration of all the world’s ugliness dripping in crimson. I still dream about it sometimes, and in the dream I’ll peer down at my wrists, engraved with the same red marks down to the veins.

The patient, Willard, saw me and said, “Thank God, a chaplain, finally someone who can hear me.”

But I didn’t want to hear him. And a part of me also thought, “You deserve this. I hope you never leave. Then you can’t hurt anyone out there.”

He said, “Look, I see your face, I’m not trying to hurt anybody. You get it? I just want to go home. Fetch me a f__ing wheelchair, would you?.”

Willard got louder. He clenched his fists and waved them around. He went into an f-bomb monologue about the staff, “you people,” about the whole dang world.

I had half a mind to leave. I didn’t have to stay. I didn’t want to stay. I kept looking at that swastika. I kept thinking he deserved to be here, to be sick and sorry and helpless.

When Willard stopped talking for a moment, I said the only thing I could think of.

Continue reading “Loving “Them.”” →