All over the city, all over the towns that stretch past the highways, and spread through the woods and the places where farms used to be, all over everywhere on a hot summer’s night, little children were being tucked into sleep. Stars, one by one, turned on, as if night lights, for little heads drifting off to the land of their dreams.
But not in the place just for the sick ones, the broken ones, the waiting-to-die ones. Not at Children?s Memorial Hospital, at Lincoln and Fullerton Avenues on Chicago’s North Side, where mothers and fathers often stay by the bedsides all through the night, tending the cries and the whimpers, whispering long conversations, or not-long-enough ones. Doing all that they can to chase away pain, dash all aloneness.
Keeping watch of the blinks and the beeps that keep some children alive, reassure them that others still are. And walking the halls, putting a hand to the small of so many backs–big backs and little ones–is a woman who calls those halls “sacred.”
“But unlike Moses,” she jokes, “we can’t take our shoes off as we walk on this holy ground!”
Stacey Jutila knows the halls well.
She has walked miles in those halls. She knows Moses, and all the rest of the Bible. Plenty of the Koran too. Jutila, 32, is the night chaplain at Children’s. She is among the few ordained ministers assigned full time to the night watch of a hospital, in Chicago or beyond. Usually, nights are covered by whoever happens to be on call. Maybe a student. Maybe someone who drew the short stick.
Not so at Children’s. Folks there listened to the nurses, the doctors. Listened most of all to parents who cried out for someone to lean on when the place, finally, is quiet. When you can hear the sounds that don’t sound one bit like home.
“Nighttime here, especially in the [intensive care unit], is the hardest time anywhere,” says Carly Haniszewski, 29, of northwest suburban Huntley. Her only child, 2-year-old Teagan, has a brain tumor and, beginning June 1, the day after the toppling toddler fell flat on her face off a couch, and everyone, especially her mother and father, realized something was wrong, very wrong, she spent 71 nights in intensive care, took six trips to the O.R., was twice told she would not live through the night.
“Your family’s all gone,” the mother explains of the curse of the nighttime. “The floor has become quiet. You hear more of a hospital, the machines. You don’t hear a ventilator until it’s nighttime. You can hear every breath of the bag. You know that that noise is giving your child that breath, and without it, she couldn’t stay alive.
“Oh my God, you just realize how sick your little girl is. Nighttime is the time that you’re mad. You’re mad that they’re sick. You’re mad at everything that exists for them. You’re mad that there’s even a children’s hospital. You’re mad at God.”
Just the week before, she goes on to say, she was standing beside her pigtailed little girl’s crib, the one with the Elmo balloon bobbing above it. It was time to say bedtime prayers.
“I couldn’t even do prayers,” she says. “There was nothing in me.
“At that exact moment, her great compassionate self [Jutila] walked in that room. She has this way of extracting every bit of everything in you. I knew she could take it. She really has broad shoulders. I told her I was so mad at God. She said that’s OK. He was waiting for it. She eased our pain with that. You always feel, ‘Well if I get mad is something else going to happen to my child?’ She got up and went to Teagan’s crib. I got very upset. We always do prayers. I said, ‘I just can’t do it tonight. I can’t find the words. Will you pray for us?’
“She found the words for us.”
Jutila, who once dreamed of becoming a doctor but realized, while working at an AIDS hospice in Seattle, “that I didn’t want to diagnose as much as I wanted to support those who’d suffered pain and injustice.” Jutila, an Evangelical Lutheran pastor, is a native of northern Minnesota who spent four years at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, in Hyde Park. She trained as a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and then was invited to stay on there for a year to specialize in pediatrics.
She was the one who filled in the blanks for the emptied-out mother who could not muster a prayer to the God of the hospital bedside. Sometimes, though, Jutila intercedes with the utterly earthly: a carton of milk for a mother rushed through the emergency room, a blanket for a father trying to sleep in a chair, a baby who needs rocking, or cooing. Or a lullaby.
Or, sometimes, a wordless escort to death.
Rena Cohen, an intensive-care night nurse, tells the story of the time one of the staff nurses had “her first death.” A 6-year-old, whose parents could not make it to the hospital, was being cradled in the nurse’s arms from 7 p.m. until 1 in the morning. Morphine dripped into the child, easing the pain. But the nurse, newly graduated, was alone in the room. Cohen, trying to juggle her own patients and the nurse with the dying child, saw Jutila in the hall.
“I just ran and grabbed her,” Cohen recalls. “‘Could you just sit with her?’ I asked. And she did. Until 1 in the morning, that nurse and that child did not sit alone.
“She just has that holding-it-together sort of feeling about her. She brings the spark of divinity into a room.”
There have been nights, says Maureen McCarthy-Kowols, the night nurse educator in the intensive-care unit, “when there’s a code in the emergency room, a baby dying in intensive care, and the nurses on 3 are mourning someone they lost in the day. Somehow she covers it. I don’t know how she does it.”
It has not been easy for Jutila, an admitted morning person, to keep vigil all these long nights for the last two years.
“It’s been a literal and figurative eye-opener to see what happens here,” says Jutila, who walks the floors each night with a spiral-bound notebook, scribbled with names and room numbers, of children, and parents, and nurses, and grill cooks, who must be seen. Who must be ministered to in the way of the night chaplain who is there for far more than just the last rites, and the final blessing of a child breathing a very last breath.
“There are so many metaphors with children and nighttime. We give them a night light. We give them milk and cookies, security blankets, bedtime prayers. Those things are amplified when a child is in a hospital, taken away from everything they know. It’s a great entry point for the spirituality of a child, creating a place of security amid all the unknown,” says Jutila.
While she is single and doesn’t yet have children of her own (she hopes to someday), she is pediatrically proficient; she takes in many a late-night Disney movie, rubs many a brow, whispers countless prayers in the dim-lit rooms of nine floors, the basement, the lobby, the ambulance dock, wherever she’s needed.
Jutila, who collects stories the way little boys collect baseball cards, tells one of her favorites.
“A little girl runs into her parents’ room. ‘Will you sleep with me?’ she asks. Her parents answer, ‘God is with you.’
“‘Yes, but I need someone with skin.’
“That guides me,” says Jutila. “These children need someone with skin on.”
And with that, the woman with skin on glides off into the night, down a hall, round a bend, into a room. Where the skin, and the prayers that come with it, shakes off all of the cold and the darkness. And all the aloneness that comes in the night in the place where the children aren’t home.
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bmahany@tribune.com
IN THE WEB EDITION
Follow Stacey Jutila on her rounds at Children’s Memorial Hospital. See the video at chicagotribune.com/nightchaplain.
