Always ready to listen
Cancer center offers a dedicated chaplain
BY JIM HOWE
“My name is Tom, and I’m a chaplain here at the cancer center. It’s nice to meet you,” Tom Anderson tells people at the facility several days a week.
“Sometimes people are wondering what that means,” he says, “and I’ll just say, ‘It’s nice to have someone to speak to, to have a couple of good ears to listen — and I’ve got a couple of good ears.’ And they’ll perk right up at that and be so happy you stopped by.
“I’ll ask permission to check back with them on another visit. I’ll say it doesn’t have to be about faith. Sometimes it’s just nice to have someone to talk to.”
Anderson, the first chaplain to be embedded at the cancer center, might meet patients as they are being infused with chemotherapy drugs, as they sit in waiting areas or wherever they may be, sometimes by referral, sometimes randomly.
He recalls a woman in the palliative care service whose son died unexpectedly and was unable to have a conversation during Anderson’s first three visits. “But I just said, ‘I’m here; if you’d like to talk, that’s fine, and if you’re not able to, that’s fine, too.’“ On his fourth visit, she opened up about what was on her mind.
Anderson is a lay chaplain. Raised as a Catholic, he was active in his church in Skaneateles, and about a dozen years ago began volunteering for prayer visits to patients at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center.
“What I came to understand very early on was people wanted and needed more than someone just to come into the room to receive Communion or to have a prayer said on their behalf. People needed to share a story about what they were experiencing and what they were feeling,” he says.
Anderson began taking classes through Upstate in clinical pastoral education, or CPE — hospital chaplain training — and became a staff chaplain at Crouse Hospital before working as a chaplain at Upstate.
Like all of Upstate’s chaplains, Anderson serves people of any faith, or no faith.
His position at the cancer center acknowledges “the unique issues that people face undergoing cancer treatment that require in-person relationships to fully address, and to go where that person is—in infusion or radiation or in the waiting room—and it acknowledges that holistic care must include the spiritual to fully address the treatment care plan that we desire to give patients and their families,” says the Rev. Terry Culbertson, who oversees the department of spiritual care at Upstate Medical University.
She says seeing that Tom is embedded at the center and available for consultation and conversation also helps support the medical staff.
“Everyone has something that is spiritual that brings meaning into their life,” Anderson says, “and it is important to journey with people and hopefully help them tap into those things that are helpful to them.
“I’d like to think that my ministry is a blessing to others, but I know that it’s a very rich blessing to me. Sometimes I think I get more out of those encounters and relationships with people than they do.”
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Cancer Care magazine.
