Keith Wakefield is an ACPE Certified Educator and Manager for Clinical Pastoral Education Programs at UCLA Health. He has spent years working as a hospital chaplain in intensive care, trauma, oncology, psychiatry, and surgical units, and has taught chaplaincy at Johns Hopkins, Stanford Health Care, and the University of Colorado Hospital. His work grows out of sustained proximity to illness, grief, moral injury, and the ordinary, stubborn work of presence at bedsides where medicine often reaches its limits.

His book Stay with Me, I Want to Be Alone: A Chaplain’s Search for Meaning, is a literary memoir of hospital chaplaincy that weaves bedside encounters with philosophy, theology, music, and his own vocational formation into a sustained meditation on what it means to accompany people in clinical settings. The narrative moves from childhood and seminary into ICUs, trauma units, neonatal losses, and the long arc of his Clinical Pastoral Education journey—now mirrored in the work of training future chaplains.

Across these scenes, Wakefield examines how human beings confront death, freedom, isolation, and meaning, and how caregivers are shaped by standing in the middle of those forces day after day. Drawing on figures ranging from Gustav Mahler and Irvin Yalom to Soren Kierkegaard, Axl Rose, and Johnny Cash, the book resists sentimentality while honoring ritual and silence as serious forms of human connection.

At its core, Stay with Me... argues that chaplaincy is less about providing answers than about staying—bearing witness to suffering, choosing love in the face of fear, and remaining present when language fails.

Contact Information:

To purchase the physical book, ebook, and audiobook (read by the author), find playlists related to the book, or reach out to Keith, please visit his website: keithwakefield.me