What happens when the helpers need help?
Critical care chaplain Hillary Kimsey was working in a downtown Seattle hospital when the first U.S. COVID-19 case appeared just miles away. For the next four years, she walked into rooms where families said goodbye over iPads, where nurses held back tears between codes, and where patients died without anyone who loved them by their side. By December 2020, she was diagnosed with PTSD.
The Well is Deep is a frontline memoir structured around the imagery of baptism-sinking, submersion, and surfacing. With unflinching honesty and unexpected humor, Kimsey tells the truth about what it cost to be the person in the room when no one else could be there.
Walk the hospital halls with her through:The eerie silence of empty ferries crossing the Puget Sound in the earliest days of lockdown
An ordination as an Episcopal priest in a nearly empty cathedral, wearing hiking sandals under her vestments
The Delta wave and the hardest day of her career
The moment her therapist said, "You can't self-care your way out of constant trauma"
Anti-vaccine protests outside the hospital while patients died inside
The slow, sacred work of surfacing-leaving the hospital, finding a parish, and learning to live with what she carries
Each chapter ends with reflection questions for personal journaling or group discussion, making this not just a memoir but a tool for processing your own pandemic grief.
For anyone who has carried the weight of caring for others. For anyone who lost someone to COVID and hasn't fully grieved. For anyone who suspects the pandemic changed them in
ways they haven't yet named. This book says: you are not alone, and your well is deeper than you know.
