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This Little Light
Hospital chaplains struggle to bring patients spiritual solace at S.F. General
Manny Fernandez, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 27, 2000
©2000 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/06/27/MNC1044.DTL

He steered the car east, toward a valley of darkened hills.

Headlights danced off a tiny crystal ball dangling from the rearview mirror. Splashes of blue twirled inside, like the light from the stained glass window that filled his church in the afternoons.

He was a choirboy all grown up. A 46-year-old baker who became a preacher -- the kind of religious rags-to-riches story no different from the tales told in the Bible he carried in his back pocket this Easter Sunday night in 1986.

He had come into the world two months premature, weighing just three pounds, a cause for alarm back in 1940. His grandfather crafted a makeshift incubator to keep him alive, lining a wicker basket with flannel and bricks warmed in the fireplace.

Because he had survived such odds, his mother always told him that he was meant for something more, something wonderful.

He thought he had fulfilled his mother's prophecy when he became a pastor. But he had no idea that his spiritual journey, like the road before him, would soon curve.

Light hit the crystal. He never even saw the truck.

Doctors said his heart could stop at any moment. Three days, they told him. Maybe he had three days to live.

All the things the Rev. Bob Walter had hoped for, all the things he had wanted -- to grow old with his wife, to see the faces of his grandchildren -- he could feel slipping away.

He called his son Dale over to him. There was so much to say. ``Always,'' he mumbled through a broken jaw, ``live for God.''

Dale left the San Jose hospital and picked through Bob's smashed Ford Escort at the junkyard, looking for anything that had survived the head-on collision. Dale took the one thing he found back to the hospital and placed it in his father's hand.

Bob held it gently. It felt like an answered prayer.

A crystal, dangling from a string.

Against the odds, Bob slowly recovered from the accident, and eventually felt healthy enough to return to the pulpit of the East Valley Baptist Church in San Jose. But on a Sunday morning in 1987, he found himself back in the same hospital, called by a doctor to see a young man no one would visit.

Bob felt odd, dressed in a blue hospital gown, gloves on his hands, a mask covering his mouth.

The patient was just a boy. A frail boy, alone. An oxygen cup covered his face and he lifted it up to speak. His name was Jonathan.

He was dying of AIDS. His parents had been told by their minister that Jonathan was beyond forgiveness. ``Pastor,'' Jonathan asked Bob, ``is it true that God can't forgive me?''

Bob told Jonathan that nothing could separate him from the love of God. Neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come. Nothing.

Jonathan's eyes widened and tears streamed down his cheeks. Bob had been in the same place as Jonathan only a few months before.

After praying with Jonathan, Bob stood up to leave. His hand was on the doorknob. Behind him, a whisper.

``Pastor. Could you touch me?''

Bob didn't hesitate, stripping off his gloves and his mask, reaching for Jonathan on the bed. ``Here,'' Bob said.

It was as if Bob had heard the call of God for the first time.

Jonathan died in his arms.

The cluster of brick cathedrals at the foot of Potrero Hill stretched to the sky above him.

Bob walked past the red iron gates outside San Francisco General Hospital on a bright August day in 1990, stopping to notice a row of marble gargoyles seated high atop the window ledges. Architects in medieval Europe mounted the creatures outside their buildings to ward off evil spirits, and the hospital's early-20th century founding fathers had done the same.

Shortly after Jonathan's death, Bob had turned away from a 20-year calling as a Baptist pastor, resigning from his San Jose church and sacrificing a steady income to start a new life at the age of 50.

The car accident and his experience with Jonathan had convinced him: Being a preacher simply wasn't enough.

The Rev. Bob Walter was now a chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital. A gargoyle, perched on a windowsill.

Bob looked inside the window. A middle-aged man wearing a wrinkled tie leaned forward in a chair, sitting alone in the hospital waiting room.

Bob opened the door quietly and sat down next to him. The man said his wife was in labor with their first child. He talked about the wonderful things he could feel when he touched his wife's belly, tiny hiccups and soft kicks, and then he talked about the terrible things now before him.

The doctors told him there were complications. The baby might not survive.

Bob reached for the man's hand and closed his eyes, praying that the Lord would direct the hands and thoughts of the staff, that the Lord would make his power manifest.

But the man shook his head. ``That's not enough,'' he said. ``Please. You talk to God, and God will listen to you. Save my child's life.''

Bob walked toward the waiting room later to hear the news, and the man ran out to him before he even reached the door.

All the mean ways of the world crowded into this place, seven stories of concrete and glass. Bad things happened to good people here every day. But there was one thing, amid such uncertainty, that Bob was sure of. As sure as the crystal that dangled from a string in his bedroom back home.

He believed in answered prayers.

The man from the waiting room wrapped his arms around Bob. His baby was alive.

Bob listened as Stephen talked about feeling isolated and lonely. He had an athletic build and movie-star good looks, but said he mostly just felt tired, old beyond his years at 32. They had met the year before while Bob was a student in a chaplain-training program at the University of California at San Francisco. Bob had prayed with Stephen's partner, Martin, as he lay dying from AIDS in a UCSF unit for the terminally ill.

Bob performed Martin's memorial service at the couple's San Francisco home, passing out candles to family and friends as Martin's ashes rested in an urn tinged bronze.

Stephen visited Bob often at San Francisco General. He had AIDS, too. And he wanted Bob to be his chaplain, when the time came.

Bob spent most of his time at the hospital with patients struggling with AIDS. He began leading an AIDS ministry training course, and chaplains from around the world studied under Bob for 10 weeks and then spread his message overseas.

The message was the same one he shared with Jonathan. Words from Romans 8. Nothing can separate someone from the love of God.

Bob now saved his preaching for his occasional visits to the pulpit, never the patient's room. It was a tradition that had been passed down to him by the founding members of Sojourn, the hospital's volunteer chaplaincy.

Sojourn was formed in the early 1980s out of the ashes of the city's AIDS epidemic. The mission of the nonprofit group was summed up in the name. Travel with patients on their journey and offer no judgments.

The chaplaincy was unlike any other in the country.

At San Francisco General, Jewish chaplains visited Christian patients, Baptists met with Buddhists, Unitarian Universalists with atheists. At San Francisco General, chaplains were 20-year-old college students in sneakers and a nose ring, insurance industry experts tired of the business world, homemakers looking for a way to give back.

The hospital was a tough place for a believer. The second-floor chapel was a windowless room with duct tape on the carpet. Vandals had scrawled graffiti on the podium. Thieves stole the cross one night, leaving just a blank, empty space.

But Bob had come to see the theft of the cross as a blessing in disguise. Now the chapel was a place of prayer as inclusive as Sojourn itself. Belonging, in a way, to no one, to everyone. Six

Stephen called Bob at the hospital one day and asked him to come over. It was urgent.

Stephen was dying.

Bob arrived at the house, wearing a dark suit and tie. Stephen's mother seemed disappointed when Bob appeared in the doorway, and Stephen told him that she expected a chaplain to be more like a reverend. A reverend in a collar.

``Is it going to kill you to put on a collar?'' Stephen asked with a smile from his bed.

``It probably will,'' Bob replied, only half-joking. Bob had never dressed like a member of the clergy in all his years as a pastor and he wasn't sure he should start now.

But Stephen had asked him a favor. So Bob drove to a Christian bookstore -- he had to ask a friend where a person might buy such clothing -- and paid $11 for a minister's black shirt and white collar.

When he returned, feeling slightly out of place in his new outfit, Stephen's mother opened the door and collapsed in Bob's arms, whispering to him for the first time of the pain of losing a son.

Stephen asked Bob and his mother later whether they could do one more thing for him. One more special thing.

Bob touched the casket softly.

He had presided over Stephen's memorial service and, afterward, told the funeral director that he wanted to be alone to say goodbye to Stephen.

No one noticed that Bob had carried a small container beneath his jacket when he first walked into the church. He took it out now and held it gently in his fingers.

Stephen and Martin taught Bob lessons he would never forget as a chaplain. There was no rule book on how to lead someone from this world to the next, but the couple helped Bob realize that he needed only to be himself. Not a minister so much as a friend.

Bob had learned that being a chaplain was about cherishing moments, without judgment or agendas. Something wonderful happened when two strangers -- chaplain and patient -- came together amid all the misfortune, strangers no more.

Bob would carry each patient's heartache inside as if it were his own, but so, too, would he hold onto all their triumphs.

Bob opened the coffin.

He placed the urn with Martin's ashes into Stephen's arms, just as Stephen had asked, and then closed the casket and stepped into the bright light outside.

Bob dressed up in his minister's shirt and collar once again. It was a special occasion.

A gay pride parade. Bob and the other chaplains stood in the center of Market Street in the sunshine, holding a banner promoting the chaplaincy.

It was the summer of 1999. He was one year shy of his 60th birthday, and his light brown hair, parted with precision, was beginning to gray at the temples. He had been a chaplain for nearly a decade.

Bob looked at his co-workers and smiled. He was now supervising more than 30 volunteer chaplains at Sojourn. He tried to instill in them the simple philosophy he put on a piece of paper and pinned to an office wall. Compassion: To suffer with.

One of his students, Martha Jo Chalmers, was having a ball at the parade. Posing for pictures with a drag queen dressed in a skintight tiger-print blouse and balloon breasts.

Martha Jo wore a summer hat on her graying hair. A red rose above her right ear.

Bob had taught her the basics of becoming a chaplain, and he loved her playful spirit. But he would soon discover just how strong she was -- and her gift for always showing up where she was needed most. She reminded him of a proverb he memorized. A day is as a thousand years.

Nurses swarmed around Martha Jo in San Francisco General's emergency room. She held the Book of Common Prayer in one hand and a patient's hand in the other. A construction worker, shivering violently, critically injured in a fall.

It was as noble as defending the country, she thought, doctors and nurses hovering over stretchers to rescue the things people were in danger of losing.

Martha Jo kept a journal in a black pouch around her waist, tucked in next to her lipstick and water bottle. She had trouble remembering the names of all the E.R. patients she visited, so she wrote them down in the notebook she carried.

Her memory was not what it used to be. She was getting older. Approaching 60 with a bit of reluctance and gratefulness. Twice-divorced and living alone in Berkeley. Three sons and a platoon of grandchildren. She had quit drinking long ago, but still kept her 10-year marble from Alcoholics Anonymous.

Don't lose your marbles, they told her. Martha Jo figured she had lost hers, buried somewhere in her cluttered one-bedroom apartment. She took her last drink of wine one summer day and was proud to leave that life behind. Now, in the fall of 1999, she was studying to become a priest at an Episcopal seminary around the corner from home. She spent her Wednesdays volunteering as a chaplain in the E.R.

Martha Jo liked being inside the trauma rooms, to hold patients' hands, to whisper psalms into their ears. She had done the same with her ailing father that day in 1987. She rode with him in the ambulance on the way to the nursing home, and it left her with a feeling she would carry all her life.

That there came a day when you started off one way and then suddenly you were headed another, never quite the same again.

Martha Jo could feel her father's ghost, and she told her mother she sensed him in the hospital room. Her mother just smiled. ``Oh, yes,'' Betty said that day in 1996. ``He's been here all afternoon.''

There was nothing more the doctors could do. Betty's kidneys were shutting down, her lungs filling with fluid. She was in great pain.

Betty told the doctors to make her comfortable, just a few more hours. ``I'm outta here,'' Betty had told them with a smile, as Martha Jo stood by her bedside.

A chaplain entered the room to perform last rites. Martha Jo had never encountered a chaplain before, and she thought the priest was unemotional. Just going through the motions. She was glad when he left. She wasn't sure what the right way to be a chaplain was, but she was sure that wasn't it.

Her mother didn't want to take the morphine right away. She wanted to lay in bed and look around a little. So Martha Jo and her mother started talking about the past, forgiving each other for a lot of grief.

Betty had danced ballet professionally. Martha Jo took after her mother with her love for the fine arts, starring in musicals in high school and studying music in college at USC.

But Martha Jo never followed through with it, getting married and having children before she graduated, only to end up divorcing and later struggling with a drinking problem.

She felt her mother resented not having a daughter who had turned out exactly as Betty had planned.

Martha Jo sat at the edge of the bed. She and her mother cried together and laughed over all their stubbornness, all their arguments that seemed so silly now.

Betty asked for the morphine. Martha Jo held her mother close, humming softly their favorite hymn, ``Amazing Grace.'' Martha Jo could feel her father at the end of the song, behind her somewhere, holding out his hand to her mother.

``OK, Betty,'' Martha Jo could hear him say. ``Let's go.''

Martha Jo passed by an open door one Wednesday afternoon in Ward 5A, the hospital's AIDS and oncology unit, stopping after she noticed the patient's name on a card.

Hope.

Martha Jo peeked into the room. A thin young woman lay in bed alone. She had big blue eyes and hair like a newborn, a string of tiny pearls around her neck to give her drab hospital gown some style.

Hope Kingston was 24 years old and she had a team of doctors hovering over her. Felt like a mad science experiment sometimes.

Martha Jo introduced herself as a chaplain and glanced at Hope's right arm, blackened from hand to shoulder. Hope just sighed. ``Oh,'' Hope said, ``it's terrible.''

Hope had Stage 4 cancer. The fourth stage was the last.

Martha Jo just let her talk. It was important. She felt it was such a gift, to take in someone's life story and be warmed by it, to carry it away with you forever.

Hope told Martha Jo how she had struggled with eating disorders and had given up on becoming a model. Told her that she wanted to do something that had meaning, to run in races like her father did back home in Wyoming.

Hope was in the hospital to undergo chemotherapy treatment. She had Hodgkin's disease. Lymphatic cancer. Struck the very young and the very old.

Hope said the cancer was a blessing. Somehow. Scary for sure, she told Martha Jo, but ultimately a blessing. She believed in numerology and astrology, believed that nothing was an accident. She thought that until you reached a certain age, everything happened for a reason, everything had a cosmic lesson to offer.

They stared at each other for a long time. Martha Jo said she loved looking at God in her. Hope blushed and said that was sweet.

``All right, my darling,'' Martha Jo said. ``You don't hurt if I touch you?''

They leaned in toward each other and held on tight, as if both were in danger of falling. Just a few moments before, they had been strangers. Now, Martha Jo felt they were in some ways as close as sisters.

Martha Jo had cancer, too.

She had to spell the word out a few times to get it right. Everyone kept asking her what the thing was called, and Martha Jo wanted to know herself.

She had trouble saying it out loud. It was like a word from another planet. Oligodendroglioma.

Martha Jo was reaching for her purse at a coffeehouse one day when it hit her. Just like that. The next thing she knew, nurses were asking her what her name was and she couldn't remember it at all.

She learned later that the thing was about the size of a golf ball. Narrow, sort of. Ugly looking. Oligodendroglioma.

A brain tumor.

She forgot her pin. Doggone it. She wanted to make the girls in the lab laugh a little. It's not just a body, it's an adventure.

But she left it back at home, and now she sat in the hospital lobby without it. The tumor often clouded up her memory, and she lost her thoughts as easily as she misplaced her hearing aids.

Martha Jo's tumor was in the left frontal lobe of her brain, and it twisted up her speech and her ability to organize. Writing papers for her classes at the seminary was like rocket science.

Mornings were always tough. The tumor was the first thing she thought about, a storm cloud somewhere behind her eyes.

She would wake up cranky. Seizures would come and go. There was a passage in the Bible, from Isaiah, about everyone being held in the palm of God's hands. Sometimes, she thought, she'd be the temperamental one biting God on the thumb.

She had done a lot of her own research after the diagnosis. That's how she learned the number. With maximum treatment -- surgery, radiation and chemotherapy -- an adult with her type of tumor was often given 19 months to live. Five hundred and seventy-eight days.

An operation was out of the question. It would leave her severely disabled, and they would have to cut through a lot of good stuff, Martha Jo liked to explain, to get to the bad stuff.

But the tumor had remained stable without radiation treatment. Her doctors told her that was unusual. They told her to just keep doing what she was already doing. Martha Jo felt that her remedy was prayer and good medicine. And more prayer.

In the lab, Martha Jo opened a large portfolio on her lap. Her collection of MRI snapshots was growing. She took out a few sheets and held them up to the light.

One was dated Dec. 16, 1997, taken one day after the tumor announced itself at the coffeehouse.

Nineteen months had already come and gone.

Someone told Martha Jo the jump would be peaceful, five minutes of endless tranquility. Her son was by her side, but everything was happening so fast she felt her heart beat faster.

Martha Jo had expected to say a prayer or two, but then she suddenly didn't feel a need to. That surprised her.

Just a few days earlier, she had sat down at her computer to update the plans for her funeral.

She had written everything out in detail. Wanted lots of flowers and music, but no alcohol. Wanted an American Indian prayer she had heard once printed on the program. Do not stand by my grave and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep.

She crossed her arms. There was a strange silence. Then she leaped into the air, a parachute free fall from 12,000 feet.

It was a great 60th birthday.

Martha Jo found Richard Manning and Tim Connor curled up in bed together when she walked into the hospital room.

She could tell they were both on edge, sad and confused. Martha Jo knew why. A priest had come to see Richard earlier, and told him that he should repent his homosexual ways.

Richard was ill, battling cancer that had been brought on by AIDS, and had been in and out of Ward 5A often for treatments. Richard and Tim told her they didn't want to hear any more preaching.

Martha Jo explained that she was a different sort of chaplain. Richard didn't want to waste time. He told her that the priest had said he was going to hell.

``If I had a God like that,'' Martha Jo said later with a laugh, ``I'd have to fire him.''

Richard and Martha Jo got a kick out of each other right away. Martha Jo liked his playful sense of humor. He was like a Little Rascal who never grew up, an artist one year past 40 still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

Richard was fighting his disease as he had lived his life. Believing that tragedy, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder. He found his art where other people put their trash. Spent hours digging in curbside piles of throwaway furniture, looking for a faucet handle he could use as a doorknob or a second-hand doll that he could trace a funky face on.

When he realized that he needed the help of canes to walk around, he redesigned two wooden ones, wrapping them in purple rhinestones and splashes of bold colors.

His room on 5A needed a little redecorating, so Richard asked his partner, Tim, to gather leaves from outside the hospital and carry them inside, like an armful of fallen stars. Richard stashed painting supplies in drawers in his room, and he spent an entire day tracing and cutting construction-paper leaves, stapling them along a wall, frozen as they tumbled from an imaginary tree.

Richard talked to Martha Jo about his artwork, his poems. Talked about Tim, whom he had met by chance about three years ago at a friend's place. Richard said Tim was an angel whose wings he never saw, coming over to the hospital just so they could take a nap together.

Martha Jo apologized for the priest's words. The most important thing in Richard's life, she realized, was his relationship with Tim, and it had been denounced. Martha Jo wondered out loud whether it had ever been blessed.

Tim told her it hadn't. Richard and Tim had registered as domestic partners at San Francisco City Hall, but never had the chance to have a more spiritual celebration.

Martha Jo said she would marry them, anytime they wanted, as a matter of fact. She didn't know where the idea came from, exactly. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

Richard yelled it out. Now, he said, let's do it now.

Out the door they went, Martha Jo flipping through her Book of Common Prayer for the marriage section she always skipped over, Tim pushing Richard toward the elevators in a wheelchair. Looking for a spot to have a wedding at a hospital. A wedding of their own, a wedding this instant.

Martha Jo made a quick stop at the chaplains' lounge on the second floor. She had another idea. Peeked inside and found two chaplains. Come on, girls, she said, today you're bridesmaids.

There was just one more detail. She waltzed into the cafeteria and begged a cook for help.

Rice, please.

Richard and Tim led them all outside to a small clearing tucked off to the side of a parking lot, a peaceful grotto with a marble altar that seemed as old as the hospital itself.

It was cold outside as twilight surrounded them. Richard gripped a bouquet of flowers Tim bought for him the day before and looked at Martha Jo with wide eyes as she read the blessings. Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.

Then she told Richard and Tim to seal their vows with a kiss, and threw rice on them both. Word spread quickly back in Richard's unit, and patients and nurses in 5A congratulated the couple.

Martha Jo thought it had been perfect. Being a chaplain had helped her learn to seek beauty in little places. That's where she found the good stuff. Taking her pip-squeak of a pup for long walks. Showering men in love with rice from a cafeteria bowl.

Back in his room, Richard clutched Martha Jo fiercely. ``Here we are,'' Martha Jo told him.

``Yeah, that's right,'' Richard said. ``Here we are.''

Martha Jo dropped by Richard's room often after the wedding. Richard saw her as a friend, not just a chaplain. She was sincere, but not a softie. His mother back in Montana was the same way.

Sometimes Richard and Martha Jo talked about dying.

Richard wanted to be cremated. He told Tim he wanted his ashes scattered over three places. A third for the earth, a third for the ocean, a third for the air.

Martha Jo had decided to do the same. She wanted her body cremated and asked her three sons to scatter her ashes over the earth, ocean and air, too.

Richard read some of his poetry for Martha Jo in his room. He had been focusing more of his time lately on writing rather than design. One poem he wrote while in the hospital. He called it ``Tortellini People.''

It was all about these people, the tortellini people, who lived with secret morsels inside their hardened shells, like a secret treasure. And how these people eventually met the sauce people, who helped set the stubborn little shells free.

He could recite it for Martha Jo from memory now, laying on his bed on the fifth floor of the hospital. As people come and as people go, the poem began, so few we take the time to know.

Outside the hospital doors, the world was celebrating the dawn of a new century. Richard lay on his bed, in pain.

He didn't want a lot of visitors now. A friend had walked in to see him one day, and Richard told him how much he hurt. ``Tell the doctors,'' he said, ``I want to die tonight.''

He was having trouble breathing, swallowing. The lymphoma had spread. Richard wanted Tim to take him home. Take him home before it was too late. He didn't want to die in a hospital.

Tim started talking to the staff about getting Richard home. He told them he would take Richard away on a bus if he had to. It had to happen now.

Then Tim turned around and there she was right next to him. Seemed as if she had appeared from thin air.

Martha Jo went to work, talking with the nurses and a social worker to see what they could do to get Richard out fast. She told them there was little time.

She grabbed Richard's art supplies, his paintbrushes, poetry notebooks and a few doll heads, and put everything in boxes and bags.

Before the ambulance arrived, Richard reached for Martha Jo and they embraced. He had never expected to find such a blessing in this place.

He told her thank you. For the wedding. For listening. It was important, he said. ``Thank you, Martha Jo,'' Richard said. ``You gave me something I've wanted all my life long.''

She smiled. ``We worked on this together, didn't we?''

Richard and Tim went down the hall together, on their way to the ambulance that would take Richard home.

Tim helped Richard get comfortable back inside their apartment. They talked for a long time, the small talk Tim had expected Richard to have forgotten about.

It was about 3 in the morning when Richard asked Tim a favor. He wanted to see the stars this night from the roof. Tim wondered if they should, worried about Richard getting hurt climbing the stairs.

But Richard persuaded him. So Tim put Richard in his wheelchair and they rode in the elevator to the fourth floor. There was a short flight of stairs that led to a small door, and Tim told Richard he couldn't possibly carry Richard up the stairs without hurting them both. Richard said he had planned for that.

Richard rose from the wheelchair and struggled toward the stairs, leaning on the two canes he had redecorated. Tim feared that they would get outside and there would be nothing but foggy grayness to stare at, no stars.

Richard finally made it, and they both sat down on the gravel of the roof, leaning against the open door.

They didn't talk at all, just sat and stared. It was a clear night, and the stars were faint but visible, a pleasant surprise. They looked up at the night sky for a long time, clusters of tiny bright lights coloring the roof of the world above.

The pages of the notebook, placed on a table for everyone to see, were filled with quotes Richard had admired. The secret to a rich life, one read, is to have more beginnings than endings.

Richard's friends and neighbors gathered in the back of a Tenderloin restaurant for the memorial service.

Tim read Richard's poem, ``Tortellini People.'' Richard's mother, Charlie Manning, read a scripture verse and there was a brief moment of awkward silence, the ceremony about to come to a close, but no one really wanting it to.

Then a voice from the corner started singing. Martha Jo stood up from her seat and filled the room with her favorite hymn, and everyone joined in.

Tim placed his arm around her shoulders, as if she were holding him up, singing softly in the dark together about once being lost, but then found.

Martha Jo took her dog for a walk around her Berkeley neighborhood. She had taken another MRI and was worried. She had been having trouble with her vision lately, and those seizures still popped up every now and then.

She passed in front of a school and noticed the remnants of what once had been a rose garden. Deer had come down from the hillsides and had eaten every rosebud they could find, leaving just bare stems hanging down.

But they missed one.

A single blossom, big as her fist. It had survived. She walked up to it, eyes wide, and leaned in, as if she had discovered the secret of life all over again. The world spun around her as she stood still, stopping, for a moment, to smell the rose.

A circle of chaplains, each holding a tiny candle, formed around Bob in the hospital chapel. New chaplains were being inducted in a ceremony, but it was hard for Bob to keep his mind on his work lately.

The days had been long and gray. Bob had a new patient. His mother, Esther Walter, who was suffering from congestive heart failure. Bob and Esther would sit together in her bedroom, talking quietly about children and family, sharing stories of times gone by.

As hard as it often seemed, Bob knew he had made the right decision to become a chaplain. His mother had been right all along. He was meant to do great and mighty things. For those he had known only minutes, for those he had known all his life.

A chaplain was blessed and burdened, all at once. Step into a patient's room and lives could change forever. There was no way of knowing what could happen. There was just this little thing, the heartbeat of a moment, a gift in a box. Open it right and sweet music played.

Near the chapel altar, another chaplain walked up next to Bob. It was Martha Jo. More than anyone else, she had helped him see just how a person, whether a chaplain or patient, could turn the end of one life into the start of another.

Martha Jo started singing an old gospel hymn, in a bold, sharp voice, and Bob joined in. This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

---

Nearly 100,000 people enter the doors of San Francisco General Hospital every year, seeking treatment for wounds seen and unseen. fall off the backs of motorcycles, down the cliffs of addiction, from the arms of health and happiness.

For the men and women who work as volunteer chaplains here, it is grim, lonely work. In these hallways, where an average of one person dies every day, the greatest miracle of all is often faith itself.

This is a story about two chaplains, Bob Walter and Martha Jo Chalmers, who face seemingly insurmountable odds -- turning their own struggles with death into a ray of hope for the patients around them.

A wedding for the dying. A warm embrace from a girl named Hope. A last wish fulfilled. Of all the lives that have been lost at San Francisco General Hospital, there is no hint of just how many have been found.

©2000 San Francisco Chronicle   Page A1