Nice review for Jackie Gormans The Viewing Room. Issue: 11/20/13 Vol. 10 No. 21 Articles Marian Betancourt Have You Worked in the Viewing Room? Heres a Book for You This book may break your heart. It will also bring you some “aha” moments, because you may have been in situations similar to those of the two chaplains, Henrietta and Maurice, featured in nine short stories set in a Southern California hospital. Dealing with situations that involve death, sometimes in bizarre ways, the author gives us a riveting look at the life of a hospital chaplain. In the first story in The Viewing Room, Henrietta is faced with a young mother grieving for her infant son and wanting him baptized. The chaplain is also faced with the desperate pleas of the young father who killed his own baby to quiet him and now begs forgiveness and wants Henrietta to pray with him. I won’t give away what the chaplain did about the young father, but she was determined to do the right thing for the baby. “She sealed the bag, being very careful not to let the zipper scratch his skin. Then she swaddled him in the blanket that was resting at the foot of the bed and carried him like this all the way to the morgue. She would tell his mother that her little boy had not made his last trip alone.” The Viewing Room is a small book of 160 pages by Jacquelin Gorman, who has worked as a chaplain in a Los Angeles hospital. A reviewer in Publisher’s Weekly called it “stark and brilliant, hard-hitting.” Gorman grew up in a family of physicians in the shadow of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland and spent a great deal of time in that state’s hospitals as a girl. She has practiced as a health care lawyer in Los Angeles and as a hospital chaplain, and is currently program director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, Reader’s Digest and other publications. She is also the author of The Seeing Glass, a memoir about her temporary loss of sight. Gorman won the Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction for The Viewing Room and if you have read O’Connor’s work, you will understand why. Gorman writes in the same direct and absorbing way about horrific things like O’Conner, whose story, “Good Country People,” about a rural southern bible salesman seducing a one-legged woman, is one I will never forget. In Gorman’s book each story is connected with the viewing room, “where only janitorial services and pastoral care have keys.” “The hospital chaplains know better than to try any kind of spiritual damage control. There are no cushiony words, sweet scents, or comforting rituals that can buffer the pain of viewing a loved one’s body, freshly dead. This room narrows to a terrifying, airless, pitch-black hallway even to the ones who truly believe that it is a journey from one life to the next. Every living soul must shrink down to its crawl-through size in order to survive a moment here.” There is a story about Birdie, an obese Native American woman dying of diabetes, heart failure, and whose body is rotting to the point where people entering the room must rub scented oil in their nostrils. Yet they all celebrate her life at the end and care for her body with great respect. Birdie’s beloved service dog remains by her side. “Birdie had put the spiritual care office on alert that when she died she needed sage burned because the scent of sage, of the open prairies of her native lands, would carry her spirit back home. Henrietta had found sage incense sticks and left them in Birdie’s bedside drawer. She could not light them, of course, or the smoke alarms would go off, but Birdie had said her soul would be so eager to leave, so quick to find escape, that it would take only the spark of rubbing the sticks together.” Henrietta tried different ways to decompress after long shifts when she was suffering from acute compassion fatigue “Once Henrietta had tried exercise as a remedy to an all-nighter of seeing dead people. She used a friend’s guest pass to 24-hour gym near the hospital. As soon as she went inside, she froze at the entryway, a paralyzed pillar of salt like Lot’s wife. Looking through the picture window at the frantic activity inside, she could see only the backward reflection of the world she was trying to forget. The flashing red lights of the cardio machines morphed into ICU heart lung monitors, the personal trainers with their clipboards and measuring tapes were medics taking vitals, the grim flushed faces looking back at them were patients hearing once again the inevitable diagnosis that life was a terminal conditions.” Maurice believed that “the hospital was one of those sacred places where the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds was gossamer thin and almost transparent. He had loved his years there.” Here’s Maurice in one story: “There was nothing Maurice hated more than the display of spiritual arrogance, not to mention the absolute lack of any cultural competence.” The description he gives of the director of spiritual care when she orders him to attend to a deceased Muslim girls’ ritual cleansing is hilarious. This alone is worth buying the book. Maurice and Henrietta both got calls to go to the viewing room one day only to discover an abandoned baby. “Maurice took the child into his arms again, and the cries subsided. He looked at Henrietta and held up his hand to stop her question before it began. No I never wanted to have one of my own, he said, but I love borrowing one, whenever I can, just for a moment, just to recharge. I do that every chance I get. I don’t leave this hospital from the basement floor after my shift. I go up first to the ninth floor, birth and delivery, and try to get some kind of spiritual palate cleansing.” The Viewing Room is a short quick read, but it will linger in mind for a very long time. The Viewing Room. Jacquelin Gorman. University of Georgia Press. 153 pgs. ISBN: 0820345482.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 18:34:57 +0000
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