Cameron Allen

AS I REFLECT ON THE YEAR 2020, one image keeps coming to mind: a closed door. We all know this door well. We’ve seen a lot of closed doors in 2020. It’s our neighbor’s door that we used to knock on as we walked through, and now it’s locked shut. It’s the sanctuary door that our children used to run, skip, or crawl through in excitement to see the saints who love them. Now that door is shut, and they only see their community of faith through tiny Zoom windows. It’s the closed door of the places we used to enjoy the most: the Tex-Mex restaurant, the local pub, the bowling alley.

There have been many closed doors this year in my work with hospice. There are few more medically vulnerable populations than those persons who have been given six months or less to live. Families caring for people in hospice have understandably been hesitant to allow visitors, even medical professionals that could provide help. Nursing homes have witnessed COVID-19 burn like wildfire in the close quarters of institutionalized living, leaving a wake of death and sickness that is unlike any other. Understandably, they’ve closed their doors to visitors. These closed doors of our nursing homes have created much isolation, suffering, and depression. Dying has become more difficult in 2020. Dying has become more isolated than it has been for years.

The hospice movement was started to combat the isolation of dying in the postwar era. Our mission is incarnational: to be an embodied presence for those at the end of life. COVID-19 has made that mission extremely difficult. As a Christian, I’ve struggled to balance the value of hospitality with this new pandemic value of physical separation, where keeping distance and wearing a mask are acts of kindness and love. How do we provide emotional, spiritual, and palliative care remotely? How do we love each other from afar?

By the grace of God we have been able to figure some of this out. Most days, it has felt like offering a measly fish and a small loaf of bread and then witnessing how the Spirit multiplies it again and again to make it enough. Prayers shared over Zoom, medications dropped off on porches, the comfort of a reassuring voice on the other end of the phone, “smiling eyes” shining above a mask, the touch of a caregiver’s hands through surgical gloves. Thank God for people whose values call them to open doors to find creative ways to care for the sick even in this time of isolation and separation.

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:16).

May 2021 be a year of opened doors. May our call to Christian hospitality bring about new ways of being together, to end, or at least to blunt, the pain of isolation. May those who die not die behind closed doors.

– Rev. Cam Allen (MDiv’07), Director of Clinical Services, Hospice Austin