What I Did Not Expect to Grieve

Learning presence through loss

I am in the middle of a Clinical Pastoral Education unit, usually shortened to CPE.

On paper, it is the clinical training program required for professional chaplains. In practice, it is far more personal. I entered CPE already working as a healthcare chaplain, sitting with people in moments when words matter and often fail; yet, I knew something was unfinished within me. I did not come to CPE primarily for the credentials, although I cannot say I am not incentivized by them. I came because I wanted to be formed. I wanted supervision, accountability, and the chance to examine my work in real time. More than that, I wanted to become a better version of myself, because who I am shapes the kind of presence I can offer others. I suspected it would require vulnerability. I did not yet understand how personally it would ask me to tell the truth.

This unit of CPE is focused on loss and grief. I expected the challenges and vulnerability of presenting verbatims of encounters, of placing my work and inner responses before peers and supervisors. What I did not expect was what would surface when I was asked to reflect on how my family grieves. As I traced the losses of my life and how I experienced them across different stages of my life, something surprising happened. What emerged was not simply grief, but unrecognized losses along with delayed grief and disenfranchised grief. These were losses that had never been named as losses, only absorbed, spiritualized, and carried forward as normal.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

I had come into CPE expecting my father’s death to be the central grief story I would explore. It was significant, painful, and formative, but I discovered that I had actually grieved that loss more fully, and healthily than others. What rose to the surface instead were quieter losses. As a child, my older sisters moving out. The way I was forced to leave my church in the mountains as a young adult. Then, the loss of my ministerial ordination. These were losses wrapped in calling language, obedience language, and faith language, losses that were never permitted to be grieved. CPE did not allow me to talk about them in the abstract. It asked me to sit with them, to notice how they shaped my relationship to authority, accountability, and community, and to see how they followed me into the rooms where I sit with patients.

Naming these losses is changing the way I offer presence. I hear stories now that often intersect with my own, stories of church hurt, job loss, and complicated family dynamics. These are the kinds of stories that can easily pull a chaplain into fixing, theologizing, or reassuring. Instead, I am learning to stay. I am learning to let shared humanity do its quiet work and to trust that presence itself is not passive.

In this way, CPE has become a place of healing for me, and that healing is not a detour from chaplaincy. It is part of the work. Unlike many professions, chaplaincy does not ask you to transcend your wounds or weaknesses. It invites you to acknowledge them and lean into them. Henri Nouwen names this tension in The Wounded Healer, reminding us that the caregiver is not healed first and then sent out, but is always being healed while caring for others.

CPE is reshaping me more than it is teaching me. It is teaching me how grief has shaped my relationship to authority and evaluation, how community can feel dangerous when loss has gone unnamed, and how sharing suffering and what I perceive as weakness can invite real feedback, even when that feedback is hard to hear. It is also teaching me how to be present with myself.

When people think of CPE as merely clinical training or a box to check, I want them to understand the human element that makes it something else entirely. Each cohort defines the experience through their shared stories, work, and lives. The particular lives and stories in the room shape the formation that happens. Our lives intersect with others who are also seeking spiritual development in real time, and that shared humanity is not incidental. It is the curriculum.

In that sense, CPE is deeply spiritual. Not because it provides easy answers or spiritual experiences on demand, but because it refuses to let us bypass what is unfinished in us. It teaches us how to stay with loss without rushing to meaning, how to offer presence without fixing, and how to become, slowly and honestly, someone who can sit with suffering because they have learned to sit with their own. This is a waypoint for me, not an arrival or a conclusion, but a place where I am learning how to stay.