WHO HE WAS RENSHIN BUNCE
I’D BEEN WORKING as a hospice chaplain and grief counselor for nearly a decade when my teacher Steve Stücky was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. After he died, I told him he needn’t have gone to so much trouble to teach me what grief really is; both of my parents had died, and many hospice patients whom I’d grown close to had, too. But there had been nothing like this.
I was seventy years old, single with no children. I had been in a teacher–student relationship with Steve for twenty years and realized that no one would ever know me again as completely as he had. Nor would I be able to develop such trust. There just wasn’t, and isn’t, time. So Steve’s death was also a death of possibility for me. My solace was in knowing how lucky I’d been to meet him and be his student.
Friends asked if I shouldn’t take time off work in those first few months: Wasn’t being around death every day too much? But my work kept me going. It meant that my life had some purpose, that the teachings Steve had so gently spooned into my heart were being used. If I sometimes had to pull over to the side of the road and scream between visits, I never let patients or coworkers know about it.
My grief over Steve’s death led me to an understanding that I’ve shared with many people since. A few months into the loss, I saw my life as if there had been a giant earthquake. All of the elements were still there, but they’d been tossed up in the air and landed in a different relationship to each other, and to me, than they’d had before. There was a hole where Steve had been. My job was to understand
