Hospital Chaplain Shares What End-Of-Life Patients Regret Most
You don’t have to be a person of faith to be visited by or to express a desire to see a hospital chaplain. In fact, a 2022 Gallup survey found that approximately one in four Americans have encountered a chaplain, with half saying that the meeting occurred in a healthcare setting (a bit more than 10 percent of those polled mentioned the military).
In her research focused on the greater Boston area, Brandeis University professor (now President of Bryn Mawr College) Wendy Cadge found that many chaplains — whether they serve in hospitals, prisons or the military — often focus on end-of-life care and “big questions,” ones that might arise more forcefully in a time of crisis.
Though there have been American chaplains in various roles for hundreds of years, it used to be almost exclusively the province of Christian clergy. That’s not the case anymore. Nowadays, the profession reflects many faith perspectives, ethnicities, and cultural perspectives — and serving Americans who may not have a faith affiliation or identify as atheist or agnostic.
READ: How Mourning Rituals Transform Loss Into Social Bonding
Even in this increasingly diverse chaplain population, Sumreen Chaudhry’s resume and path to chaplaincy would still be notable. A staff chaplain at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Chaudhry has both a master’s in Buddhist and Museum studies.
Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Theology and Religion (with a focus on Islamic Studies) at the University of Wales Trinity St. David, Chaudhry worked in museums and taught art history for almost a decade before making the transition to working in the bustling, interfaith environment of large hospital, where she and two other full time chaplains (there are others who serve part-time or are called in to visit those who express a desire for a particular faith background).
What ties her academic interests, prior career in teaching and current work together? It is, she said, an interest in people and a desire to be helpful to them, whether it’s in a college classroom, the local Rite Aid drug store, or the halls of a large city hospital. She and the other full-time chaplains have a caseload of 200 patients (the departmental policy is that they all will be seen within ten days).
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What links your prior work in academia and art history with your current job as a chaplain?
I have found that my entire life, people opened up to me immediately. Then later, they would say, "I don't know why." I just told you that. I don't even know you. I was the keeper of a lot of things for people. But I couldn't be a professional listener, right? I didn't want to be a therapist. I had done therapy myself in my own life, and that wasn't the path for me. Chaplaincy is. I think that when I was ready, ready to really show up in the world and help other people. I found myself in chaplaincy without even knowing what I was doing.
What is it like to encounter a new patient? Are you surprised by anything?
Ninety percent of the time, they open up immediately because they're holding so much in. When you're stuck in a bed, you have a lot of time to think. I walk in thinking there might be talk about their cancer, and (instead) they're talking about their mom who died 20 years ago, right? I hear things that I'm not expecting. Because, why? Because they're humans, and they could be 80 years old and they have cancer and are sick and are missing their mom, right?
I really believe in the power of two people connecting. I believe in the power of two people being seen and validated, which is what I do. I spent time with a Buddhist woman who had cancer and was being sent home on hospice care. She essentially did a life review. She told me she had lived a good life, followed the path, took care of her siblings because her mother worked, and donated to charity, as well as putting aside money for her funeral. She was sharing that she wasn't afraid of dying or the afterlife or being a burden on her family after their death.
But she was concerned about the welfare of her younger brother (in his early sixties) after she was gone. Sometimes it is the chaplain’s job to see underneath the things that don’t seem to be making sense and help them make meaning of life by making connections, affirming, and grounding themselves.
I think there have been times when people, especially people who may not have a religious affiliation, ask what the point of life is. Like, what? Why was I here? I don't understand.
Sometimes people talk about feeling sinful. I validate that it’s what they are feeling, but talk about how God is love and mercy. I put some stuff down that maybe they don't need to be carrying: stuff from their Sunday schools or from Catholic school or whatever it might be, they interpreted in a particular way, so that they can experience what they are experiencing. What happens in those rooms is all patient-driven. I follow the patient.
What are patients seeking more than anything else?
I try to help them connect to their inner self, their inner child. And I ask many of my patients who are open to it, like, what does that child want? And I'm not kidding you, 100% of the time, the answer has been “love.”
What do people grieve, if anything, near the end of their lives?
When I’m with people near the end of their lives, what I most often witness is not fear of death itself, but grief over unfinished relationships and or unexpressed parts of the self. Many people grieve time they now see as wasted on what felt urgent in the moment but unimportant in hindsight — work that eclipsed connection, worry that crowded out presence, obligations that pulled them away from what actually nourished them. Alongside this is grief for words left unsaid, tenderness withheld, and versions of themselves they didn’t feel permitted to become.
There is also a very quiet grief around being seen accurately (did anyone really know me?) — and around the fear that their life might dissolve without meaning once their body does. Even when pain or medical decline is present, the deeper sorrow is usually relational and existential rather than physical.
What often surprises clinicians is how rarely this grief is framed in formal religious language, even when it is deeply spiritual. People may not talk about God, heaven, or doctrine, but they speak with great care about love, beauty, forgiveness, memory and continuity. They grieve the possibility of disappearance — of being erased from the web of meaning they spent a lifetime weaving.
That aligns closely with my experience of caring for people who identify as “nones.”
Surveys have found that belief in an existence beyond the physical has increased, including among those who might identify as a None. What are you hearing?
Many do believe in something beyond the strictly physical, even if they resist naming it. They might speak of energy, connection, love that doesn’t end, or of becoming part of something larger — nature, family, legacy, or the universe itself. Often, what they reject is not transcendence, but rigid or coercive religious frameworks that didn’t make room for their lived experience.
At the bedside, these distinctions matter less than presence. When people are given space — without agenda or assumption — they often articulate a sense of meaning that exceeds the body, even if they never use the word spiritual. My role is not to supply belief, but to witness what is already there: the human longing to belong, to have mattered, and to remain held in some way beyond the moment of dying.
Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Religion News Service, National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners, Christian Century, The Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer.