Not All Spiritual Care Involves Prayer – Sometimes It's About Popcorn

"My mother's not a religious person," her daughter said to me. "She's been away from her church for a long time."

This is a sentiment I hear a lot in my role as a spiritual counselor at Care Dimensions. Often, people will even apologize for not wanting to meet with me. I get it. But I also think this happens due to a misunderstanding about the role my peers and I serve. People may not be religious, but we are all spiritual.

When I hear someone say they don’t believe in God, I love to respond with “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” This is a way of opening the door, of meeting the person where they're at, and beginning a conversation about spirituality. On many of my visits, we don't talk about a god or a supreme being. We talk about how someone is feeling, about their life, and often, their legacy.

The Popcorn Man

That daughter who told me her mother wasn't very religious initially declined my offer of a visit. But after some thought, she invited me over.

I met the mom in her room. She was bedbound but awake and alert, though with some cognitive impairment. We started talking, and she wanted to tell me that she was from Salem, specifically that she grew up in the Salem Common area. She asked me if I knew it.

As it happened, I was fortunate enough to have some great aunts who lived in that area and spent much of my childhood there.

I asked her, "Do you remember the popcorn man on the Common that used to have the gas-fired cart?"

I didn't even have to finish my thought. She immediately lit up.

This woman probably couldn't have told me what she had done the day before. But she was able to go back and tell me in detail about the popcorn man. Then she opened up and talked about the bandstand in the Common and how on Sundays they would have bands and the families would gather.

She was really illuminated. She was smiling.

The daughter followed up with me a day or two later. "I'm surprised," she said. "My mother said she had such a wonderful visit."

And here's the key: that visit was void of any god or religion. (Had she gone there, that would have been great, and we would have had that discussion.) But as is often the case with spiritual care, you allow them to lead where they want to go. You'll usually end up in a place where the person finds some peace, or even joy.

A Brief but Important Time

Spiritual counselors come in for a very brief time and a very emotional time. Our intentions are sincere and compassionate, but we're usually strangers to the people we're seeing. For so many, the introduction of a spiritual counselor is the first time that hospice becomes real to them.

And we're asking them to open up about some very heavy things: acknowledging their fear, their anxiety, the unknown, the loss of their autonomy. These are important conversations to be had.

When I have a visit where it's active listening and just allowing space for a person to be heard, I can see their spirits raised. And it also replenishes my own soul. Being a spiritual counselor in these moments really is a sacred privilege.

The Beauty of Hospice

I started studying death and bereavement back in the 1980s. I first heard then that we're a very death-denying society. It saddens me that over the past four decades, I don't think we've moved the needle in the right direction, at least not enough.

Few people want to talk about death or think about hospice, but death is a natural part of life. The more we open up and have these conversations, the better prepared we are for the journey ahead. 

I wish more people would see hospice for the beauty that it is. It's an enormous gift, allowing the focus to be on comfort, care, and dignity.

Stephen Thompson Kohut is a spiritual counselor at Care Dimensions. After a lengthy career, he was ordained as a deacon in 2017 and found his calling in end-of-life care.