Gina Maio (pronounced May-oh) and her husband of 30 years, Matt, live in the City of Richmond. Cultivating conversations has been a vital part of Gina’s professional and personal journey as an educator and active member of her faith community. She was ordained in 2011 and currently serves in the most fulfilling role of her professional journey: as a Hospice Chaplain. The most important thing she does every day is listen with her heart, soul and mind, cultivating conversations to help patients and their families prepare for death.

On Thursday, Oct 12th, we hosted a beautiful and intimate Faith & Work Forum over lunch with Reverend Gina Maio, an at-home hospice chaplain. She shared hard earned wisdom about cultivating conversations around the death bed. Below are some quotes and resources to help you navigate these challenging yet sacred spaces in our lives.

How do you handle challenging conversations in your work?

Rev. Maio emphasized how a lot of her job as a hospice chaplain is listening, asking questions, then reflecting back what she hears—and repeating that cycle again and again. Active listening for her involves listening with your nose (is someone smelly? Are they getting proper care?), her hands (does the patient seem like they want physical touch like hand holding for comfort?), and her posture. She will get down or below the level of the patient, even sitting on the floor, rather than standing over them like a doctor might do, to change the conversation dynamic. Rev. Maio keeps a keen ear open for what is not being said, and often uses the phrase “sometimes someone might feel _____ in situations like these…” to encourage a patient to share more about their feelings.

What breaks your heart in your work?

Sometimes, Rev. Maio said, she will engage in conversations around faith and the afterlife (although this only happens when the patient shows an interest in discussing their faith first). She says that occasionally a Christian will say they don’t know if they’ve been good enough for heaven, and this breaks her heart, she says, because these folks do not understand the beautiful gift of grace they’ve been given through Christ. “There is nothing any of us can do to earn a spot in heaven; we have received salvation through grace, and it breaks my heart that some people I talk with do not understand that they are loved despite how they may or may not have lived.”

Her heart also breaks for people who have been abandoned in their final stages of life. The unfairness of life is imminent when patients are lonely as they grow closer to passing. “My heart breaks and also is filled,” she said.

Gina opened up the floor at the end of the Forum for questions, and audience members vulnerably shared about their struggles with losing loved ones. She closed with a blessing from Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie’s book, The Lives We Actually Have:

For this Grief Stricken Day

God, we are heartbroken in the face of

so much evil, so much grief.

Comfort us in our sorrow.

Blessed are we who allow ourselves to feel it—

the impossibility

of what was possible a second ago—

the light decision,

the casual stroll,

the easy exchange and ordinary duty,

a decent choice or a banal one,

the sweep of hours on a day that was like any other,