Healing sickness, one laugh at a time
Our correspondent writes about what it’s like to be a chaplain
I walk the floors of Overlook Medical Center, wearing a kippah on my head, an ID badge with the word chaplain written on it around my neck, and sporting some of the wildest, most colorful shirts you could ever imagine.
When I’m not in the hospital, I never introduce myself as rabbi, it’s always Lenny, but in a hospital, with myriad people walking in and out of patients’ rooms, I want them to know who I am and what I do from the minute I walk in.
One morning I walked into a room on the orthopedic floor to visit a 79-year-old woman, and I introduced myself:
“Hi, I’m Rabbi Lenny Mandel, and other than getting you discharged, over which I have no control, is there anything that you need, or that I can do to make your stay here a little better?”
“It would be nice if you could actually get me thrown out of here,” she said. Her son was sitting against the wall, and he chuckled.
I asked her why she was in the hospital. She smiled and said: “I’m pregnant!”
“That’s great,” I said, knowing that she was pulling my leg. “Mazal tov!”
“Are you nuts?” she said loudly. “I’m 79 years old! You actually think I could be pregnant?”
“Sarah was 90 when she had a baby,” I said.
“Sarah from the Bible?” she replied. “Who knows if anything in the Bible really happened, and even if it did, who knows what 90 years actually was back then?”
I looked at her son, whose smile had grown, and then looked back at her. “You know, you’re not much older than I am,” I said.
She laughed. “Get outta here. What are you, 58 or 59?”
“Oh,” I said. “You really want to get pregnant!”
Her son was holding onto the chair laughing hysterically, and she said, “Rabbi Lenny, get a chair, and sit right next to my bed. I don’t want doctors, nurses, physical therapists or anybody else in this room. Just you and my son. I just want you to keep making me laugh all day.”
In the movie “Patch Adams,” Robin Williams, dressed as an angel, visits a curmudgeon in a hospital. This is part of what he says to the dying man:
“Death. To die. To expire. To pass on. To perish. To peg out. To push up daisies. To push up posies. To become extinct. Curtains, deceased, demised, departed and defunct. Dead as a doornail. Dead as a herring. Dead as a mutton. Dead as nits. The last breath. Paying a debt to nature. The big sleep. God’s way of saying, ‘Slow down.’”
The dying man in the movie responds with a huge smile.
Death and laughter are not mutually exclusive, and neither are laughter and sickness. I believe, unequivocally, that laughter is the greatest healer in the world.
The woman who I visited that day on the orthopedic floor of Overlook Medical Center wasn’t dying or anywhere near death’s door, but just being a patient in a hospital makes you think of your mortality.
(Trust me. I was a patient for seven and a half weeks after a near-death motorcycle accident in 2004.)
The day that Bishop Manuel Aurelio Cruz, Newark’s auxiliary bishop, visited Overlook, he told me his own story.
“I was a chaplain at a hospital for 12 years,” he said. That means that he knows that “when you walk into a patient’s room, if you can’t empathize with their fear, anxiety, or the uncertainty of the outcome of their illness, it’s time to retire.”
My greatest fear growing up was dying. From the time I was 7 years old, I was afraid to fall asleep, fearing that I‘d never wake up. So I read. I read about four books a week, falling asleep with a book on my face, and my dad would come in, take the book away, and turn off the light.
Fast forward many years. I was teaching Jewish lifecycle events to the confirmation class of a Reform synagogue in Springfield.
“How are you going to deal with the student who’s scared of dying,” the principal asked. I laughed. “You’re looking at him,” I answered.
I walk the floors of the hospital hearing laughter. Seeing the smiles that I bring to the faces of the patients, their families, and most of the staff at the hospital is beyond rewarding. More than one patient’s family has said that I brought light into a very dark room.
As for my fear of dying — I’m not scared of dying anymore. Now, it just ticks me off!
Cantor/Rabbi Lenny Mandel, who left the wilds of Manhattan almost 50 years ago and lives in West Orange, has been the chazan at Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson for the past quarter century.
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