Interviewee: Yusuf H. Hasan

Interviewer: Mary Marshall Clark

Session 1, Part 2

March 18, 2004

New York, New York





Q: Okay, we’re ready to hear more stories.



Hasan: The next story I want to talk about is faith. I remember a time I went to a patient room, and so happened it wasn’t a patient that I really was going to see. There was a different lady in the bed. She was in ICU. I went in with my Holy Koran in my hand, and I thought she was a Muslim lady I was supposed to see. Turned out she was not a Muslim. But when I walked in, I said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you was Mrs. So-and-so.”

She said, “Oh no. She’s not here, and I’m Mrs. So-and-so.”

I said, “I’m sorry for interrupting you, then.” Her and her two daughters was there.

And she saw the Holy Koran in my hand. She said, “Oh, no. Come sit. Come and sit down with me.” She was a very sick lady. She said, “No. Come and sit, and sit with me.” And we begin to talk. I found out from her that she and her family—she was elderly. Well, her grandfather was a Muslim in Iran, years ago. And she said, “I remember that book, when I was a little girl.” She said, “I was a little girl. I remember that, the Holy Koran.”

And she begin to talk about—we begin to talk about things, you know, her trauma she was going through. Her daughters were very pleased that I was there to talk with her mother, because it brought back her early childhood and how she grew up in a Muslim household. But now she was in America for many years, and she had became a person out on Long Island who was, I think, of the Christian faith. But we talked and we connected.

So, eventually, she got very, very ill one day. She had a massive heart attack. Before she died, though, she told her children that she’d like for me to be a part of her services. And they had a leap of faith, because when she passed away I was at home, and they had a brother—they had a large family. But one of their brothers was a biker, you know, and he was estranged from the family. He was never there. They had never got along too well with him. So he found out that she had passed away. Now, they tried to get him to come in and say goodbye to his moms.

I’m at home. They said, “Please, Imam, you must come. We want you to come, because my brother will not go in the room. He will not go in until someone go with him, and he’s afraid to go in this room because of how he treated his mother.”

And the father said, “Please, we need you to come.” The husband, “We need you to come and be with us, because we’re all afraid to go up now and say our goodbyes while we wait for you.”

So I had to come all the way from Queens back into Manhattan. When I got there—when I got there, the biker, he was there but he was very distraught this time. He was crying outside the hospital. The whole family was standing outside of the hospital.

I walked up to him and I said to him, I said, “Now, that’s your mother, and your mother loved you. And I know you love her, because you’re here.” I said, “What we’re going to do, you and I, I’m going to take you upstairs and I’m going to let you go in this room, and leave you there with your mother. And you talk to your mother. Let your mother know that you were here. Okay? You know she’s gone, but you need some time alone now with your moms. And when you finish—when you finish, when you feel like you’re finished and you come out, then the rest of us will go in, and we’ll all have to say our goodbyes to your mother. But we want you to go—I want you to go alone.”

And—now, he’s a biker. So I had to take him by his hand, like a child. And he had faith that he was going to be able to get through this. He went in, stayed with his mother about twenty minutes. He come out; he was pleased. We took the other family members in—the father and the children and grandchildren, and they all said their goodbyes.

So after I finished, it’s time for me to go. And they says, “Oh no.” They said, “Mother would want you to do her funeral. She would want you to do her funeral. She’s already said that, that she wanted you to take care of her funeral.” She said, “We’re going to do the funeral in a couple of days, and we’re going to send for you to come out to Long Island,” way out on Long Island, Massapequa, somewhere out there.

When I went—they sent for me. I went out to Long Island, and believe me, I was the only person of color—I was a Muslim—there in the place. And I found out, when I finished doing the service—we did a good service. I think it was a good service. They really enjoyed the service, to the point where her brother and sister—they was elderly, too—they said they want me to do their services for them, too, after that.

We went to the house after we went to the gravesite to bury her. What make it so ironic about that is that once we—I said, “Now look. We have to cover the grave.” I said, “We’re not going to leave your mother out here on the ground and have the gravediggers to cover her, because you all love your mother, and if you cover her casket completely, then you’ll begin to heal. You’ll feel much better about yourself when you leave the graveyard, that you went all the way with her.”

So we begin to cover the casket, and it was a cloudy day. It had been raining earlier, but it was real cloudy. And all of a sudden, as soon as we finished putting all the dirt on the casket, like the sun just popped out. And the family’s, “Oh, that’s just like Mother. She would do something like that, you know? Would do something dramatic, of that nature.” So the sun popped out and they said, “Oh, she’s sending us a signal that she’s fine.” And they were so pleased with that. We went back to the house and we stayed there and talked a while, then.

But that was a very moving thing for me, to come there and do a service where this lady connected back to her roots as a Muslim in her earlier days, and then to be buried as a Muslim. That was a powerful thing for me to see how that happened. That means that it wasn’t anything planned. It was God in motion, that I would walk into her room and meet her, and then she would connect back to her faith, and then she would be buried in the faith tradition of her grandfather and father. That was a moving thing for me, and I don’t forget that. And the family, we’ve stayed connected.

And the last one, another one I want to talk about is hope. Hope. This story is about a young boy. He was fourteen years old, and he and his family was traveling, had traveled all over. They had been to England. They had been to Paris. They tried to get help for his tumor that was on his neck. The tumor was big as a softball, on his neck. And when they brought him here to Memorial, the physicians called me and say, “Imam, you need to tell this family that there’s nothing we can do for this boy, because if we try to take this tumor off of his neck, we would have to cut his whole neck off. He’s going to die.”

And this made the father totally upset with God, and the mother. The father got so upset, until he and his daughter left and went back to their home state of Yemen, and left the mother and the boy here alone in America for continued treatment. They was so devastated.

So the young boy, he was only fourteen, and he and I connected very well. So, I used to go to his room two or three times a day, just to try to help him get through what he had to go through, which was, he was in the process of not being able to get any more treatment, and so he was really on the hospice care.

When I would go to the room, the mother would leave out, but she would stand outside of the door. She would not go too far. And so one day he said to me, he said, “Imam, I’m dying, and I know I’m dying.” He said, “But I can’t stand this pain.” He said, “I don’t want a lot of morphine, because I want to be able to say, ‘There is no God but one God,’ when I die, because I want to meet my mother in paradise.” He said, “I want you to do one thing for me.” He said, “I want you to help my mother keep her faith, because she’s losing her faith in God.” And she was.

And so we would try to devise a plan, because we talked about everything; some of the mundane things in life like basketball and football and things of that nature, and we talked about his concerns for his mother, too. So we had to talk loud enough where she would hear us as she would stand outside the door. So we used to talk loud enough that she would know that he was really concerned about her faith, losing her faith.

So one day I went to the room and she didn’t go outside. She stayed in the room, which was good. But she didn’t pray with us. Next day I go by. She take her hand and raise her hand a little slowly, just a little bit, not to pray with us, but like she was trying to regain her faith. So the third day I went by and talked to the boy, and we communicated, and we began to pray. This time she raised her hands all the way up and began to pray with us. And I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I saw a young man being healed. So it wasn’t a physical healing he was looking for; it was a spiritual healing. And about three days later he passed.

And his mother sent me a letter back, saying to me that she really appreciated how we stood with her, stayed with her, and helped her regain her faith. And you don’t know how that made me feel, to know that just to be there for someone would make a difference of that nature. So that talked about faith, how you would have faith, and not looking for a physical healing, but a—there was no hope for a physical healing. But there was a spiritual healing, which is very important for this young man, so that he can meet his mother again in paradise. I’m just grateful to have been a part of that, to see that miracle take place right before my eyes. It was really important to me.



[Interruption]



Hasan: So that was very moving for me, to see a young man have that kind of courage and that type of faith, and the hope that his mother would regain her faith. And she did. You know, as chaplains, we do some cutting-edge chaplaincy, you know. Sometimes we have to take chances with patients and family members.

I have another good story I want to say. Matter of fact, this was about a boy, a young boy in Harlem, on the street. I had finished my day’s work at the hospital, and I was on my way home. I lived in Harlem at that time. I was on my way home and it was kind of like in the late evening.



[Interruption]



Q: So we’ll just redo this whole story, the one that you’re about to—



Hasan: Okay. So I want to tell this story about a young man on the streets of Harlem. I had finished my daily work at the hospital, pastoral care, and I was on my way home, and I sees this young man in the middle of the divider on Lenox Avenue, naked. And he was prancing up, walking up and down the divider, where now the cars had to stop and couldn’t nobody go past him, because he had got in the middle of the street. He was naked, and he was screaming that he want Channel 7 News to come out. He want the news. And now the police department have come. They have police all over the place now, and they’re planning—and I saw them taking their night clubs out—what they was going to eventually do to this young man, I would think, because he was really very irate. He was really out of it, I believe. Well, he was naked.

And so I was walking past and I said, I know this. If the police go over there now and try to confront him, it’s going to be a terrible thing, I believe, in the street. So I said, well, I’m going to take a chance, try some of my pastoral care, my cutting-edge pastoral care. So I goes up to the young man, and I steps to him and I use forceful language. I said, “You’re screaming and hollering out in the street here, talking about you want Channel 7 News. If you keep this up, you going to have Channel 7 News, but you going to be right over in that funeral home you see right across the street there.” I said, “You need to pull your clothes up on you and get out of this street and go home.”

And he looked at me. He said—and I said, “I’m not afraid of you.” I said, “You need to get yourself together here, because you’ve caused a whole panic in the street here. You’ve got the police department over there ready with night clubs to come after you.” I said, “Now, I’m trying to help you get yourself together.”

So he stopped, and he started pulling his pants up. Then I said, “Okay.” Then he pulled his pants up and I said, “Now, I’m going to walk with you.”

He said, “Help me.” He said, “I want to go home.” He said, “I want to go home now.”

I said, “Where do you live?”

He said, “I live in the Bronx.” He said, “Well, could you give me a hand?”

I said, “What you need?”

He said, “Walk with me to the subway station, and I don’t have a token. Could you give me a token? And I’ll go home.”

So I got him to pull his clothes up, got him out of the street, walked on the sidewalk, and as I’m walking him on the sidewalk to take him to the subway station, I see the police department. And the people on the street begin to clap, and I wondered what they was clapping for. And then police say to me, “Great job you just did. That was a wonderful job, to go out and help him pull his self together,” because they was really prepared to go out, and they knew it was going to be a confrontation.

But to see them clapping, and other people in the street, they stop and say, “Thank you for taking care of this young man.”

And I walks him to the subway, put in the token in the thing, he got on the train and went on home. Never heard from him since. But that just show you that when you have pastoral care in your heart, that you will go where angels fear to tread, to help people who are in distress and need.

I think his problem was that he was spaced-out on some type of drug or something like that; he just needed someone to confront him, to say to him, “This is wrong. What you’re doing is wrong and you must snap out of this.” And he really snapped out of it and went home. And I don’t forget that, that, you know, we have to take chances in this type of work if we’re going to truly help people along the road of life.

The last story I want to say is about another young man. He was a patient, in-patient at a hospital. And this young man was violent. He was violent against the staff. He had already attacked the doctor. He had attacked his private—he had a private nurse, and he slammed the nurse’s arm in the door, hurt the nurse. And he was cursing at all the staff in the hospital. “Go back to your country. You need—I don’t want you all in this country,” this and that and that and this. You know, humiliating people who was trying to help him through his illness. So they called me and they told me, they said, “Imam, please come here and help us with this man.” They called me—I was in the office. They called me on the phone. “Could you come by and help us with him? Because he’s been very violent. The security’s afraid to deal with him.”

And so I said, “Okay.” I goes up to the floor, and I sees him standing right in front of the nursing station, cursing them out. I mean, literally, using profane language, everything he could do. So I walks up to him and I get right up in his ear. I says to him,

“You know, you should treat these people better than that, because they could easily slip something into your medicine at night, you know.” I said, “Don’t treat them like that, you know. That’s not a way to treat people, you know. Treat people the way you want to be treated. These are doctors and nurses here, and they’re caring for a lot of other people besides you, and so you need to be mindful that they can easily do something to you.”

So he stopped for a minute and thought about that for a second, and then all of a sudden he turned to me and started calling me a name. He called me the N-word, and that I should go back to Africa, and this and that, and that and this. And when he called me the N-word, I got right up in his ear again. And I started taking my necktie off. I said, “You know, I’m not a holy man, you know. I’m not a holy man. I’ll take this necktie off and I’ll roll your big butt down this hallway out of this building. Now, you call me that—.”

And he ran back into a room and sit down, and that’s when the nurse come to me and say, “Imam, what did you tell him?”

I said, “I gave him pastoral care.” And ever since then, this guy would see me and they said he’s been just like a lamb.

Ever since then he would see me, “Hey Bro, Bro.”

I said, “I’m not no bro. Don’t call me Bro. You call me Imam, or chaplain. Don’t call me old slang language out in the street like that.” And they were so pleased that someone had enough guts to tell this man, “Look. This is it. This is enough right now. You done did enough damage around here.”

And someone asked me, said to me, “But Imam, what if he’ll call your bluff?”

I said, “But I was not bluffing. That’s the point.” I was not bluffing with him, and he knew that, that it was not a game for me. It was serious business. You know, “You’ve already caused the whole hospital a big uproar. The patient representative, everybody around the place trying to take care of you, and you still cursing people, and you going to call me a dirty name like that.” And found out that some of his friends had been slipping him drugs into the hospital.

So, sometimes you have to be tough in pastoral care, too. You can’t be all holy all the time, and expect people to respect that. Sometimes you have to be able to say, “This is what it is. This is how it have to be here. You’re in a facility for treatment and for support and for help, and this might be the only way to give it to you today, is in this harsh tone and in this threatening manner, as you have been threatening people. Then you should get some of the same medicine and see how it feels.”

So those are some of those important things I had to say today. I’m just happy to be a part of this movement of pastoral care. Right now I’ve been asked by the Association of Professional Chaplains to be the chairman of the Diversity Task Force, which is to recruit three hundred board-certified people of different faith groups and cultural backgrounds, to become board-certified in the Association of Professional Chaplains within the next ten years. So that’s a monumental job, to try and recruit people of different faith groups to become board-certified chaplains, because we see the face of chaplaincy must change.

It has a been a Protestant, mainly male, Caucasian organization, but the face of America have changed, where we have people of many faith groups, many backgrounds, many colors, and we need to change the face of people who provide pastoral care to people of their particular faith group. People identify with themselves, you see. And so I think that’s important, that we move in that direction of change, in this movement of pastoral care. And I’m just happy to be one of those who might make a little, small contribution to that change to pastoral care. Thank you.