BY TOM CAIAZZA
Staff Writer
EDISON — Peg O’Halloran said her job is like two rings touching. They do not overlap, one does not overwhelm the other. They are simply complementary.
As the first full-time chaplain at the Barbara E. Cheung Memorial Hospice, O’Halloran’s job is to provide spiritual companionship for the dying and those being left behind.
She is a counselor, a soothing voice and a compassionate touch. She is there at the conclusion of life and the embarkation of whatever comes next. But most of all, she is a reassuring ear.
“That’s what they want,” O’Halloran, of North Brunswick, said. “They want the companionship, they want the listening. And they may share stories from their past, their life review.”
O’Halloran’s job begins with the dying process. It is a time in life where one takes stock of the life they have led, finding solace and asking questions.
“You just let the person be who they are in that process,” she said. “Some have fears, some don’t have fears.”
Life, she said, is filled with questions. That does not change with death. O’Halloran said patients ask her questions about death and dying, but her job is not to simply provide answers.
“I don’t really feel I have to give answers,” O’Halloran said. “I would say to the person, ‘What do you feel happens to you after death,’ or ‘What do you want to happen to you after death.’ So I really empower the person to answer their own questions.”
To her, though, it is the questions that are the important part.
“You have to live in the questions rather than the answers,” O’Halloran said, “because the older you get, there’s more questions in life than answers.”
O’Halloran’s life has been one of service. She spent 11 years in the Sisters of Mercy convent. She has taught theology in high schools, done social work for those living with HIV and AIDS, and was a director of social services at Elijah’s Promise Soup Kitchen in New Brunswick.
Through this, she has led a spiritual life, not necessarily a religious life, and has brought that spirituality into a job that requires sensitivity to those of all faiths.
As part of her charge with the hospice, she offers counseling not only to patients but to families. For 13 months after the death of a loved one, O’Halloran will keep contact and provide support for the families. She said that 13 months is a deliberate period of time because the hospice wants to make sure that families have support through all the “firsts” they experience without the deceased.
O’Halloran also runs the free weekly support group, which is open to the public and is not just for people who have lost someone in the hospice. She calls herself “the facilitator” because she helps those who are grieving do so in a manner that is best for them.
O’Halloran has an outlook on the dying process that is not the way society as a whole views it.
“Birth is such a happy, exciting moment, and society looks at death in just the opposite fashion,” O’Halloran said. “And I really believe that we have to have some education with the continuity of a life cycle.”
It is with this outlook that she is able to come to work each day without the weight of death hanging on her, or the specter of her own mortality tapping the shoulder of her consciousness.
“I never feel like the job or hospice is depressing or trying. I try to leave work at work until I come back. That’s why I can have a refreshed spirit every day.”
O’Halloran said that her life’s work has not been a vocation in the religious sense, but a path in the spiritual. She said the word vocation means “a calling,” and while she would agree that helping people through their final stage of life is a calling, she insists it was not something one goes out looking for.
“Those paths come to us,” she said.
Of her path, she said that she does not find it to be taxing or trying.
“I don’t really find it hard,” she said, “it’s a gift. It’s sad, there’s a sadness to see some spouses and children and family and lovers have to let go. But it is part of the life cycle and we can’t go around it.”
O’Halloran calls the hospice “sacred ground.” On her desk, in her modest office, sits a picture of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. It is a nod to her family and her Brooklyn, N.Y., upbringing. Beneath the photo appear words that seem to sum everything up.
“Our life is a little gleam of time between eternities.”