Entertainment - Entertainment News

POSTED: Sunday, Mar. 15, 2009

Song by song, Bellingham Threshold Choir seeks to comfort the dying

Three women cluster around Diana Ward, who lies back on her bed, rests her head on a pillow and listens as they lift their voice in song.

"Up above my head, up above my head.

"I can hear music in the air, I hear music in the air..."

As Linda Allen, Lori Douglas and Anne Albosta continue singing - accompanied only by the sound of Allen's clapping hands - Ward raises her head and studies each member of The Bellingham Threshold Choir, who have come to her home this January morning during her struggle with polymyositis.

The disease causes progressive muscle weakness and complications such as shortness of breath, increasing pain and difficulty swallowing. There is no cure. Ward, 69, was diagnosed in 1989.

But there is respite and peace in the songs choir members perform for her during the 30 minutes they're in Ward's Bellingham home. They sing the uplifting "This Little Light of Mine" and the playful "Kookaburra" and "Scalloped Potatoes." They sing softly the poignant "How Can Anyone Ever Tell You?"

On a nearby table in the front room where Ward's bed sits is a book of poems titled "The Gift," by Sufi master Hafiz, a collection of ecstatic love poems from the Persian mystic that sought to make God tangible. During a brief pause between songs, Ward says: "These girls are happy. They carry the light with them to so many. Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Started by Allen in August 2007, the all-women Bellingham Threshold Choir is part of a national movement that seeks to comfort those who are sick or dying, and their families, through song. By request, members will sing at people's bedsides.

The original Threshold Choir was started in California in 2000 by Kate Munger. There are as many as 70 such choirs, most of them in the U.S.

"I think boomers, of which I am one, are looking at the end of their lives," explains Munger, who says she's pushing 60.

"It seems right that we would re-look at something as important as death and reassess it and revisit it so that we get to do it in the way that is meaningful for us."

Locally, most requests for choir members to sing at someone's bedside come through hospice. Bellingham Threshold Choir members have a repertoire that includes Christian hymns, children's songs, lullabies, as well as multicultural and multifaith lyrics. They also will croon familiar favorites like "Danny Boy" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." There are up-tempo songs like "Pack Up Your Sorrows" and others reserved for those near death, such as "Breathing In/Breathing Out."

Many of the lyrics in their repertoire are drawn from the founding Threshold Choir's songbook, where nearly half the songs have been written by choir members. What they sing will depend on clients' religious and cultural backgrounds, and how close they are to death.

Allen says choir members also gain from the songs.

"These songs are very healing. They're wonderful to sing. It's also for us," says Allen, an ordained interfaith minister whose doctoral work focused on voice and the spirituality of voice.

To Allen and other members, participating in the choir and singing at someone's bedside are a calling to sacred work, a chance to ease someone's pain or death, a chance to share what is unique to each woman - her voice.

"It's not a doing but a being," says Munger, who lives in Inverness, Calif. "It's offering my deepest core to someone else's deepest core."

Douglas, a 64-year-old Bellingham resident, echoes that view.

"There's definitely a feeling of sharing and easing, and kind of a little bit of wonder," she says. "I don't feel like I know what comes next for anyone. ... I'm sharing in that unknown. It's a way of being very close to someone."

Allen says when she heard about Munger's work, "it was like a shiver that goes up your back."

"That's when you just feel like you got tapped on the shoulder," says the 63-year-old Allen.

For Albosta, a 27-year-old Bellingham resident, the choir offers her a chance to learn from older choir members and to work on her voice. It gives her an opportunity to focus on an essential part of life that is too often ignored.

"Death is such an incredible experience that I feel is not honored, talked about or revered in the culture," says Albosta, who describes herself as a deeply spiritual person.

And, so, on a Tuesday night in January, nine women gather at the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center in Bellingham.

Among those at the rehearsal for Bellingham Threshold Choir are hospice nurses and caregivers, women who watched loved ones die, women who want to serve through the simple act of gathering and singing - for others and for themselves.

"Our whole bodies sing when we sing," Allen says. "It's like you're getting a massage from the toes to the top of your head."

Tonight, they practice. They sing in rounds. They put one of their own in a chair - this evening it's Albosta - and they gently lay their hands on her and sing to her, softly.

When called on, a small group of them - most often two or three - will go out and gather at a client's bedside. No instruments. Just their voices, singing or humming as softly as if they were holding a baby close, to ease someone's pain, to ease the way.