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The Rev. David P. Wentroble didn't see himself ministering to people at the ends of their lives when he graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1978.

"I guess I just wanted to work in parishes," Wentroble, 51, of Fairfield, recalled on a recent afternoon in his second-floor office at The Nathaniel Witherell nursing home.

But Wentroble's first job as a pastor took him to a Presbyterian West Virginia church with mostly elderly parishioners. He found himself visiting hospital, nursing home and hospice patients in subsequent jobs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. By the time he read about the opening at Greenwich Chaplaincy Services in 1991, Wentroble was beginning to understand his vocation more clearly.

"You know, it's just terribly rewarding," said Wentroble, who is in his final week as a spiritual leader in Greenwich's nursing homes and assisted living facilities. "You get to know these people's life stories, the struggles they've had. Most of these people lived through the Great Depression, World War II, some of them World War I. You learn their loves, likes and dislikes. The people here are great gifts."

Since he was hired by Greenwich Chaplaincy Services 14 years ago, Wentroble has become an integral member of the town's large group of ministers, rabbis and priests. Founded in 1966, Greenwich Chaplaincy Services is a nonprofit organization that operated on a budget of $92,000 last year and includes Wentroble, a part-time Catholic priest, a lay chaplain, and a part-time secretary. The organization provides spiritual care for residents of the town's long-term care facilities.

Constantly venturing forth from the office that Greenwich Chaplaincy Services rents for a nominal fee from the town, Wentroble has run programs for dementia and Alzheimer's disease patients, Bible studies, asked visiting priests to put on a weekly Catholic Mass at each of Greenwich's three nursing homes, tapped Jewish Family Services and local rabbis to comfort Jewish residents, overseen Protestant religious services, talked to relatives of residents in long-term care facilities, helped staff members at those facilities, and made daily, one-on-one visits to elderly residents all over town.

"Sometimes (moving into a nursing home) is more traumatic for the family than the family member," said Wentroble, who will move to North Manchester, Ind., next month to become chaplain of a 375-bed continuing care retirement community. "You say you'll never put your relative in a nursing home, but then it gets to the point where you have to."

A self-described "people person" who "hates the administrative side of things," Wentroble, who chairs the national Alzheimer's Association's Connecticut chapter, designed an innovative religious program specifically for dementia patients. He carries a bag of stuffed animals or a blow-up globe to a roomful of people losing their cognitive abilities and taps into their deep-rooted religious memories. Singing well-known hymns, reciting the Lord's Prayer and the rosary, Wentroble uses repetition in his services so that he can engage the dementia patients with familiar objects, Bible passages and songs. Dementia patients' earliest memories are often their strongest, he said.

It was during such a session that Greenwich Chaplaincy Services' current president saw Wentroble work.

"He is gentle, so gentle," said Judi Mastoloni, whose mother, Mickey Forbes, lived in Greenwich Woods Health Care Center's Alzheimer's unit from 1994 to 2001.

"I used to go quite frequently and watch him deal with dementia patients with his bag of lambs and his Biblical readings, and when my mother was dying he was there," Mastoloni said. "He was there, he sat with my sister and we held hands."

Wentroble said he'll never know how effective he is with the dementia patients.

"But I'm hoping, I am," he said. "I hope that as memories, songs, prayers and readings come back, then a sense of God's love in them will come back, too."

With the rest of the patients he ministers to, Wentroble said he finds himself discussing larger questions of the meaning of life and God's will.

"I missed the course in seminary that gave you all the answers," Wentroble said, "but you struggle along with these people and find out what they feel."

Greenwich Chaplaincy Services' has formed a search committee to find Wentroble's successor, Mastoloni said, and hopes to hire a new chaplain this summer. But it will be impossible to replace Wentroble himself, she added.

"The wonderful thing about David, too, is that it doesn't make a difference about what denomination you are -- he's there just as a caring person."

Part of that ability and sensitivity has to do with Wentroble's interfaith training in Clinical Pastoral Education, a nationally certified program that brings theology students and clergy of all faiths into supervised encounters with people in crisis. Wentroble completed his course 20 years ago while living in Pennsylvania.

"They (nursing homes) are places that a lot of people are afraid to go, because they represent our fear of our own mortality," said the Rev. Catherine "Kitty" Garlid, a Cos Cob resident who has been Greenwich Hospital's director of spiritual care for 23 years and teaches the course as a certified associate supervisor with Decatur, Ga.-based Association for Clinical Pastoral Education. "It gives students an opportunity to overcome some of their own fears, and helps them be in a community with elderly people and to form relationships that really bridge that distance between a pretty marginalized part of our society and the religious community."

Wentroble's greatest strength is his knowledge of the people he ministers to, said Garlid, who was a member of the search committee that hired him in 1991.

"One of the things I've been impressed with is, when a nursing home resident is hospitalized at Greenwich Hospital, David always follows them there, and he knows them," she said.

Few nursing home residents have gotten to know Wentroble as well as Margaret Forte. Forte, who has lived at the Witherell for 17 years and turns 94 this month, said she looks forward to her almost daily visits from the minister.

Though Forte is Catholic and receives her deepest spiritual guidance from a priest, she said she enjoys Wentroble's company and will miss him deeply.

"He's a very, very nice man," Forte said. "He knows I'm a Catholic, so we just talk about the weather and things like that. I hate to see him go. I'm going to lose my best friend."

Copyright 2005, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.

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