May 17 | CPE: The First Week

PHEW! This week has been a doozy and it’s not even over yet!

It was my first week of CPE this week, and tomorrow is my first day on my unit. I’m so excited but a little nervous as well! It’s going to be a bit chaotic – one of my learning goals is to develop a non-anxious presence – but I’m sure I’m in good hands. I’m really excited to meet my mentor, a Romanian Orthodox priest who has like twenty of his own gorgeous paintings festooned all over his office.

This week was long and intensive, but helpful. We actually witnessed a viewing on Tuesday, and were taught how to prepare a body for a viewing. Being in a morgue is a very strange thing. The shapes under the sheets are recognizably human, but they are so very still. My brain ended up playing weird tricks on me, because it wasn’t used to seeing such human forms being so still. I knew on a primal level that they were more than objects or dolls – somehow the brain understood that they were people, but they were all wrong somehow. It was like having cinderblocks on my brain – I could turn my head but feel their presence there behind me or beside me – heavy and sombre.

Preparing a body for a hospital viewing is also a bizarre experience. Although, again, it was clearly a person, I actually had no problem seeing the face. Somehow it was so much more horrible to see the bag being unzipped and that quick flash of yellow, loose skin. Once the face was visible, it wasn’t that bad. It was only the second body I had ever seen. Some time ago I had played at an open casket funeral, but it was obviously quite different. That person had been made-up, dressed in nice clothes, and surrounded by flowers. She looked like a doll, maybe even like she was just sleeping. The mortician had done a good job. Here in the morgue, of course, there was no glamour, no softness, no pretending death was anything but inevitable. We had no makeup, no flowers, no nice clothes. Our supervisor draped a blanket over the body, propped the head up with a towel or two, and gave the hair a quick comb. He tried to close the mouth, which hung open – the person was elderly and had no teeth left. It wouldn’t work, which was unfortunate – the person really didn’t look as peaceful as we would have liked. There was nothing to do about it, though.

Once the body was prepared, the sheet was draped over the face and the cart rolled into the viewing room. We went up to meet the spouse, who was with a couple of social workers. We all went down to the viewing room together, and our supervisor gently pulled the sheet back.

As the spouse wept, everything suddenly changed. It was no longer a body, but a person – a beloved, a spouse, a child. We all got quite teary-eyed. It was incredibly moving. Even now I get teary-eyed thinking about it, whereas when I was writing about the preparation, once again I found myself simply recording what I saw. Every minute was very holy – the preparation included.

So before I write about my first time on the unit, I’ll let you know one of my learning goals, which is self-reflection. To do this, I’ll be keeping a journal, and I decided to share some of what I write on this blog. I will likely not share everything I write, and all personal information about my classmates and the people I visit or minister to will be kept to a minimum with no identifying information given. If names are included, they are changed. The journal is more for tracking my own growth.

So if you’re interested in taking CPE, read through any of the marked entries and see if it’s right for you, or give me a buzz! I fully expect it to be one of the most profound experiences of my life and education.

-Clarity