Helping an elderly woman shop for her husband’s casket. Teaching an adult child about sitting shiva for a parent. Suggesting ways to honor the legacy of a dying grandmother.
It’s all in a day’s work for Shoshana Phoenixx, the interfaith chaplain for the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services.
Phoenixx figures she’s guided some 2,000 people through grief, health problems, and other life crises and transitions since she came to work just 14 months ago as the agency’s first-ever chaplain.
Depressing work? Not in the slightest, says the 38-year-old counselor, who wears a gentle smile along with a color-coordinated kippah to match almost every outfit in her closet.
“I love what I do,” she emphasizes. “It’s not depressing at all. It’s often sad. What would be depressing would be feeling I could not have any impact on my clients’ lives.”
Phoenixx doesn’t downplay the enormity of the emotional burdens and sorrows piled upon many of the clients who seek out her services. Grief, she says, is a “lifelong process. It’s not like a cut you get that heals. It’s like losing a limb.”
Phoenixx sees her role as providing her clients with spiritual tools and information for coping with those times of crisis and loss.
“There is a space, a holy window that opens up when you face major tragedy,” she believes. Her aim is to “help people to lighten their burden, to help them walk the road and not be alone.” JFCS offers her services to the public free of charge.
“More and more people wanted and needed some spiritual connection,” says Amy Rassen, the agency’s associate executive director.
Phoenixx doesn’t dictate how clients should or shouldn’t handle any particular crisis. Nor does she preach the approach of any particular religion. “I come from a Jewish perspective, but I serve folks who are Catholic, Buddhist” and many other religions.
Her clients include terminally ill patients, relatives and caregivers, patients living with chronic pain, Holocaust survivors, and people attending the agency’s bereavement and healing support groups.
“They’re of every mix and stripe,” says Phoenixx.
Some of her contacts last no longer than a brief phone conversation, such as one from a caller who wanted to respond in a culturally appropriate way to a Jewish co-worker who experienced a death in the family.
“I get a certain amount of the Jewish Shell Answer Man questions,” she quips.
She also fields calls from adult children who want to “do right” by their deceased parents but are unfamiliar with the rituals of sitting shiva and shloshim, the 30-day mourning period. “A lot of these folks need the educational pieces” about various spiritual approaches to a particular life-altering event.
Other times, Phoenixx develops close links with a person or family facing a crisis. Last fall, for instance, she began working with a dying grandmother and her relatives who were seeking support in what was “becoming a very quick process.” She suggested that the woman create an ethical will that would pass along her values to her survivors.
Because the grandmother wasn’t able to write out her wishes, Phoenixx met with her and asked questions while the woman’s daughter took notes. The result was a cross-stitched piece of fabric created by family members over Thanksgiving. It permanently and artfully set down the grandmother’s last wishes to her family. “It was one of the most touching experiences,” recalls Phoenixx.
An East Coast native, Phoenixx adopted her surname to reflect her belief in life’s regenerative possibilities, after moving here in 1988.
Phoenixx knows quite personally about what it means to endure loss. Over a seven-month period when she was 19, her mother died of cancer and her father died of a heart attack.
“I’ve been there. I’ve walked that road,” says Phoenixx, who credits her mother’s foresight for finding her a grief-and-loss group before her death.
Phoenixx worked with Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the renowned expert on death and dying, and spent more than a decade working in hospices in New Jersey before studying to become a chaplain.
“I was born to do this work,” she says. “There’s a lot of sadness in the people I meet, but there’s also a lot of joy.”