Remembering Rev. Linda Siddall, former Director of Spiritual Care

We honor Rev. Linda Siddall, who passed away in March 2022. Rev. Linda served our community for 20 years with great care and compassion, retiring as our Director of Spiritual Care in 2016. She believed that “each person brings us closer to the divine.”

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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. Other spiritual care volunteers have included Buddhist priests and Christian lay Eucharistic ministers.

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

She was especially proud to have 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 was 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 believed that spiritual practices go beyond religious rites and rituals. To help her maintain her own mindfulness, her computer would ring with the sounds of Tibetan bells (mindfulclock.org) on the quarter and half hours to “remind me to stop and breathe.”

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

More about Rev. Linda:
• Ordained as a minister in the Church of Religious Science, 2004; a licensed lay minister from 1995-2001
• Completed a three-year spiritual directors institute training at the Mercy Center in 2012
• Degree in religious studies from Emerson Theological Institute in Oakhurst, CA
• Metta Institute, certificate in end-of-life counseling
• Certified Reiki practitioner