The women who sing lullabies for the dying
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After weeks of warm rain, it was a clear and cold night in January, with bright stars over Berkeley, when I handed the kids off to my husband shortly after he got home, and went to hear the Threshold Singers of the East Bay sing. Founded in 2000, they are one of the original chapters of the Threshold Choir, an organization that trains and supports small groups who sing for people who are terminally ill or dying. Driving to their rehearsal, trying to get in the right headspace for listening, I switched between the news and a podcast about the global origins of polyphony. The day before, an ICE agent had shot and killed Renée Good, a mother of three, and as much as I tried to focus on the recordings from Africa to Eastern Europe, that news stayed like a drone below all the other notes.
The rehearsal was being held in the common area of an apartment building, in a hilly residential neighborhood close to the Berkeley Oakland border, one of those utilitarian spaces on the threshold of public and private life, where preschool boards meet, or AA gathers, or where sometimes meals are served following weddings or funerals. When I arrived, the singers—30 women facing each other in a circle—were in the midst of “Give Me Wings,” one of the hundreds of original songs composed by Choir members. The original repertoire means that those sung to won’t have previous associations with the songs, which adds to their “threshold” quality; they don’t quite belong to the music of this world. I joined the circle and was handed a binder of songs.
One of the organizers—tall Max, her silver hair cropped close to her head, wrapped in a winter jacket—stood up to arrange a bedside demonstration. A portable easy chair was set up at the center of the circle, and Max asked who would like to sit in it—who would like to stand in for the ill or dying. Several women raised their hands, but one was already playfully swaggering her way there, like a lead entering from the wings. From her general confidence—and San Francisco Opera sweatshirt—I guessed that this must be Margo, one of three singers I had spoken with, and the one of these most drawn to Threshold by music. Raised by Jewish atheists in the Bay, she had been surrounded by music her whole life, from plastic records and 45s of Swan Lake as a child, and growing up listening to her father, a concert violinist, before performing as one herself. Later, she worked with her brother at West Edge Opera (formerly Berkeley Opera), matching subtitles to music during performances, and had been singing, and teaching, with Threshold for 20 years.
“You have no idea,” she had told me when we spoke, “the depth of music in my soul.”
Margo took her place at the center of the circle while three other women organized themselves around her, including Max, who explained their purpose, simply: “Margo,” she said, “We’re here to sing for you.” Margo smiled and nodded energetically, continuing to play her role, perhaps with more enthusiasm than one might expect from the dying, before lying back under a green blanket that another of the singers draped over her, and closing her eyes.
The artificiality of roleplaying dissolved as soon as the women began to sing. Max sang the first line before the others joined in three-part harmony. Margo’s smile relaxed. The voices radiated outward, passing through our surrounding circle of silence, in waves.
The song was “Rest Easy,” one of the oldest and most beloved in the Threshold repertoire, written by a member after a dream of “trying to comfort a colicky baby.” Many of the group’s songs could be described as “lullabies” for the dying. This chapter also sings to infants in the NICU at Kaiser, humans on the other end of the spectrum of a lifespan, suspended between womb and home, and singing at a deathbed could feel similar to attending a birth, as one of the singers, retired home midwife Sylvia, explained to me. After years supporting people in labor, which proceeds through definite stages—contractions, transition, pushing, delivery—she had at first been struck by how distinctive each death was. “Everyone has to do it their own way,” she explained. And yet, when she described the feeling of singing for the dying, “everything kind of shrinking into focus in that one room,” it reminded me of my experience giving birth to my second son, at home with three midwives. “One very small space of a circle of people all just exchanging love,” as Sylvia put it.
Birthing or dying require “a lot of focus” for the humans passing through those portals, Sylvia said. Music can provide a focal point, a thread to follow in or out, and can even feel instinctive for some in the midst of that process. Of all the senses, hearing is the first to develop in utero, and one of the last to which dying people physiologically respond, bridging the divide for both arrivals or departures, in or out of life.
The babies they sing to are “trembling, trembling on a threshold,” as Jacquelyn Marie told me; she had been a women’s studies librarian in Santa Cruz, and has been singing with the group for 22 years. The songs produce “an incredible response.” Nurses have noted a drop in blood pressure, and the singers can see the babies—and their watchful parents—becoming “more relaxed.”
When the bedside demonstration ended, Margo fluttered her eyes open, and her persona returned: “To stay or not to stay,” she said, getting a few laughs around the room as the mood shifted.
Then the leader of the group for that night asked if I would like a turn. I did, and also, making my way to the center of a room, with all those strangers watching, activated some kind of deep-seated adrenaline response, like the first day of walking into a new classroom. My heart was racing as I climbed into the chair, tipped back, and closed my eyes. There were a few beats of silence, then the music began. While as a witness to Margo’s bedside demonstration, the harmony had radiated outward, now I could feel it coming towards me, from all sides. I tried to slow my breath, latching onto lines that rose, fell, and repeated: “passing through darkness and light,” “seas of doubt” and “the sacred starry night.” I tried to imagine how the music would feel, if it was accompanying me toward death. But the experience of thirty women’s voices combining in three ranges all around mostly made me feel very, very alive.
After, back in my spot in the circle, but still vibrating, I paged through the binder and learned that the song had been “Guide Me through the Darkness,” one of many written by Threshold’s founder, Kate Munger.
Not all Threshold groups are all women, but this one was, and it was something I asked each of the women I had spoken with about. I first heard of the organization from a friend in Massachusetts, who was a witch. Using music to ritualize and sanctify the space and time around death sounded magical to me; that the Threshold Singers generally work in groups of three brought to my mind a host of mythic and literary allusions, from Shakespeare’s three "weird sisters,” chanting and brewing fate in Macbeth, to the harmonizing triple goddesses of fate at the end of Plato’s Republic, shuttling souls in and out of life.
During the rehearsal, one of the singers reminded others of their mission, quoting their founder: “We are kindness, made audible.”
Sylvia said it didn’t matter that much to her that the other singers were women; the first group she sang with, in San Luis Obispo, had included men. Intention and disposition felt more important than gender. But for Margo and Jacquelyn Marie, the all-women space (inclusive of all women, both had carefully noted) was part of the power for its participants. “I’m very woman oriented,” Margo had told me; Kate Munger had been a “really strong mother figure” for her, she said, “more than my own mother.” And Jacqueline Marie told me about how she had participated in women’s consciousness raising groups in the Bay in the 1970s, seed beds for second wave feminism and the women’s spirituality movement. In her case, the experience led her out of a marriage, back to school, and into her career as a librarian. There were connections between those groups and Threshold, she said, in terms of the deep community she experienced in each, but they were not directly parallel.
Part of Threshold Choir’s broad appeal and power, I think, is that its practices were arrived at intuitively, rather than as outgrowths of any particular ideology or set of shared experiences within a single community. According to Kate Munger, the idea for Threshold had two starting points. First, in her experience of impromptu singing for a dear friend who was dying of AIDS in 1990; and then, toward the end of the same decade, beginning to sing for animals she found killed along the side of the road. Drawing on the experiences of peace and connection she found in these instances, Kate carried the idea for the choir with her for a decade, before the first gathering, in El Cerrito, on “the vernal equinox” in the first year of a new millenia (March 21, 2000). The East Bay and Marin chapters were the first to form, and Kate was involved with the formation of others around the Bay (Bolinas, Santa Cruz, etc), then the country. Now there are chapters in countries around the world.
While contributing to a deprivatization and reritualizing of death, and grief, in ways that resemble practices that religious and folk traditions may have supported in the past, Threshold Choirs are importantly areligious. Some of the songs draw language from Buddhist or Yogic texts, but members come from a variety of spiritual or religious backgrounds. Each of the three women I spoke with noted how their work with Threshold aligned with meditation or mindfulness practices. But unlike the liturgies that were performed at deathbeds in medieval Europe, say (which musically mirrored a theology of the soul’s “ascension,” as Eleanor Stratton Hild writes in her study of this tradition), the only idea Threshold wants to convey is a very general kindness. During the rehearsal, one of the singers reminded others of their mission, quoting their founder: “We are kindness, made audible.”
What does kindness sound like? A line or two, repeated, woven together, exemplifying the simple fact of interconnection, and the constancy of life cycles.
As the rehearsal proceeded, I disappeared into it. I didn’t know, before arriving, if I would sing. But I found, in such company, it was impossible not to, and aimed for the middle, where the melody lived.
The last song of the night was also arranged by Kate Munger, with words by Ram Dass, “Walking Each Other Home.” One of the singers got up and climbed in the chair while we were singing. In fact, throughout the rehearsal, women let themselves in and out of that center. This last listener’s white hair and peaceful face floated above the green blanket, her practical shoes supporting feet, splayed easy, on the other side.
“We are all just walking each other home,” the women sang over and over. In the Spanish translation, which intersects the English in a recorded version, the meaning swerves a little, the way translations do: “Caminamos juntos a nuestro hogar.” It’s the walking together that carries us, and the place it brings us is cognate with that ancient word for home, the hearth. The gathering fire, where someone may be stirring a vessel. To which we arrive, from which we depart.
Gillian Kidd Osborne is a writer and educator from upstate New York who lives in California. Her current interests include rabbits, caterpillars, plants, hills, soil, women, children, proximate wildernesses, ritual, magic, and play. She’s the author of Green Green Green.
