The Work of Healing
Aug 19, 2025
By: Kevin Deegan
“Trauma is stored in the body, but so is resilience. Your body remembers, but it can also learn to feel safe again.”
— Dr. Arielle Schwartz
As a hospice and palliative care chaplain, and later in a trauma center, I have walked with people through some of life’s hardest moments. I’ve sat at the bedside of the dying, listened to families navigating impossible decisions, and learned how to offer presence when there were no words. For years, I lived out my calling as a helper—trusting that even when I couldn’t fix anything, my ministry of presence was enough.
Then came COVID. Overnight, the ways I had always cared no longer worked. I couldn’t hug, couldn’t sit close, couldn’t offer the human touch that gives comfort. Instead, I held up iPads for final goodbyes. I delivered last messages. I bore witness in hospital rooms when families weren’t allowed inside. And for the first time in my ministry, I felt helpless. The one thing I had always been able to offer—presence—was taken away.
What I didn’t realize was that I was absorbing the weight of those moments. I carried not only the grief of strangers but the unrelenting trauma of being the one who stayed when no one else could. Without noticing, I took it into my own body.
Eventually, my body told the truth my mind had been suppressing. One day it simply gave out. That collapse became the turning point, the moment I finally realized that what I had been holding was no longer just “part of the job.” It had become a part of me— a part that needed help to heal.
True healing begins when we listen to our bodies and give ourselves permission to release what we were never meant to carry alone.
With support, I began tending to that pain. In doing so, I also uncovered older wounds from my childhood—parts of my story I had long left unattended. The work of healing has not only restored me, it has made me healthier and more whole than I have ever been.
Now I carry a deeper kind of knowledge. Trauma lives in the body, yes—but so does healing. My own journey has reshaped how I care for myself, and it deepens the way I now walk with others in their suffering.
