The Sacred Threshold: A Chaplain’s Journey Through End of Life

There is a place in life where words grow quiet, where the sound of machines fades into the background, and the whisper of eternity draws near. It is in this sacred space—a place of profound mystery and unspoken awe—that chaplains often find themselves walking beside those who suffer, guiding them gently toward the edge of this world and the beginning of the next.

I have stood in many rooms filled with sorrow. I have held trembling hands, anointed foreheads slick with fever, and whispered psalms into ears already half in heaven. I have seen the eyes of the dying widen in peace, and I have seen others fight with holy fire, resisting the pull of death until every breath was spent. Each life is its own gospel, and each death has its own testimony.

But there are also rooms where despair hangs like thick fog—where families, hollow-eyed and breathless with grief, stare into the face of their beloved, and no words, not even the holiest ones, can soothe the ache. Sometimes, despair feels like a hole torn in the earth itself, a yawning chasm that swallows joy, memory, and even faith. The suffering is sacred—but not soft. It cuts like a blade.

There are no answers that satisfy in these moments. No tidy theologies or comforting clichés can fill the vacuum. Hope begins to slip like sand through trembling fingers. The family looks to me—not for solutions, but simply for someone to stand in the abyss with them, to witness the unraveling without turning away.

And so I stay. Silent, mostly. A presence. A breath. A prayer that barely finds form.Because this, too, is holy ground.

Suffering, in its rawest form, strips us. It leaves the soul naked before God. The sacredness of suffering is not in its explanation—but in its capacity to open something eternal within us. In the unbearable aloneness that grief brings, we come face to face with the reality that nothing is in our control—not life, not death, not even the pace at which we must say goodbye. And yet, mysteriously, the Divine is still present. Not fixing, not lifting us out, but abiding, weeping, watching with us.

I remember sitting with a mother who had just lost her child. She didn’t cry at first—just stared, empty, into space. She looked at me and said, “I feel like the world ended, and no one told the sky.” There was nothing I could say to that except to sit beside her in the wreckage. To acknowledge, with my silence, that the pain was real, worthy, and utterly sacred.

There is glory in these places—but not the kind we expect. It is not bright or triumphant. It is a shadowed glory like Moses hiding in the cleft of the rock as God’s presence passes by. It is the glory of raw love exposed and hearts that break because they have dared to love deeply.

And even in the pit of despair—even when every light has gone out—something remains. The presence of God flickering like a wick in the wind.

Fragile. Almost imperceptible. But there.

This is the chaplain’s calling. To walk into the spaces where faith has cracked. To honor the silence. To bless the sorrow. And to believe—when others cannot—that the One who made us from dust will not abandon us to it.

As the psalmist cries, “Even if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there” (Psalm 139:8).Even in the grave. Even in despair. Even in the silence.

To stand with others at the edge of death is to bear witness to both the horror and the holiness of being human. It is to walk beside them not with answers but with presence, not with power, but with love.

And when the soul slips from this world to the next, it is often with no fanfare—just a soft letting go.But I have learned that even that quiet release echoes with eternity.

This is sacred work. Painful, humbling, full of heartbreak and wonder.And it is holy—all of it.