The Rev. Linda Siddall - Chaplain and Director of Spiritual Care

The year was 1995 and Linda Siddall had experienced the deaths of three relations—including her favorite aunt and her father—over a two-year span.

“That sent me into a tailspin,” recalled Siddall, a former banker who was operating her own technical writing and corporate training company at the time. She was not present at any of the deaths.

Soon after, a guest minister at her church talked about hospice work, and Siddall was immediately touched.

“It was as if God slapped me upside the head and said ‘Wake up,’” she recalled. She wanted to become a hospice volunteer but realized she still had her own grieving to do, which is when she joined Mission Hospice’s grief support group. In June, 1996, she became a spiritual care volunteer. Current spiritual care volunteers include two Buddhist priests and several Christian lay Eucharistic ministers.

After longtime Mission Hospice chaplain Walter Johnson fell ill, Siddall was asked to assist him as chaplain and to become the bereavement coordinator. Since then, she has become both chaplain and director of spiritual care.

She is especially proud that she has been instrumental in outreach to the African-American
community, resulting in a major increase in participation at Mission Hospice & Home Care, both as patients and volunteers. Much of that work has been through contacts with the African-American Community Health Advisory Committee at Mills-Peninsula Health Services and with primarily African-American churches.

Raised a Methodist in her native Midwest, Siddall said she joined the Church of Religious Science (not Christian Science) because of its inclusiveness, which is also the basis of hospice’s approach to spirituality and religion.

Siddall believes that spiritual practices go beyond religious rites and rituals. To help her maintain her own mindfulness, her computer rings with the sounds of Tibetan bells (mindfulclock.org) on the quarter and half hours to “remind me to stop and breathe.”

That mindfulness allows her to create space for patients and their families to take the opportunities for spiritual transformation at the end of life.

“I couldn’t continue to do this if that didn’t happen. I would have burned out.” she said. “Instead, each person brings us both closer to the divine.”

THE NUTSHELL

CAREER
• Ordained as a minister in the Church of Religious Science, 2004; a licensed lay minister from 1995-2001
• Mission Hospice, 1996-present
• Owner of Simply Stated Business Communications, a technical writing and corporate training firm, 1984-1996
• Crocker Bank, Vice President of Commercial Lending, 1968-86

EDUCATION
• Currently in year two of the spiritual directors institute at Mercy Center
• Southern Illinois University and the Academy of Art in San Francisco
• Degree in religious studies from Emerson Theological Institute in Oakhurst, CA
• Metta Institute, certificate in end-of-life counseling
• Certified Reiki practitioner