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View ProfilesPublished October 26, 2022 at 10:00 a.m.
On a brisk October morning, nine members of the Hallowell hospice choir convened outside Valley Cares, a small rural nursing home in Townshend. The singers, on the upper end of middle age, wore sweaters, fleece vests and sturdy shoes and chatted with the casual ease of people who have known each other a long time. At the appointed hour, they went inside, quietly arranged themselves in a sunny alcove and broke into song: "Blessed Quietness," "Amazing Grace" and "I'll Fly Away," in rich four-part harmony. Their listeners were a dozen or so nursing home residents gathered for a short memorial service for three fellow residents who died recently.
Afterward, Kathy Leo, who founded Hallowell nearly 20 years ago, remarked, "That was lovely, but it was different than the intimate experience of a bedside sing."
The Hallowell singers are affiliated with Brattleboro Area Hospice, which provides free nonmedical services to terminally ill patients and their families in southeastern Vermont. The singers typically visit a dying person in their home or hospital room to sing a handful of songs, then slip out the door.
"What we do is a practice, not a performance or a ministry," Leo said. "At the heart of it is learning how to accept and be present with whatever is before us."
Hallowell has about 40 members — all of whom receive specialized training from hospice staff — but they sing in groups of between four and eight. When families of hospice patients request a visit, or when Leo offers one, the singers assemble outside a house or hospital room and enter as unobtrusively as they can.
"Sometimes we hum our way in," Leo said. The singers don't introduce themselves or make conversation, unless the patient initiates it.
"There's no format, no predetermined way it's going to happen," Leo said. "We are always reading the room. It all depends on where the person is on their journey and where the family is in their process of grief and letting go."
Bedside singing is a centuries-old tradition around the world, carried out by Benedictine monks in medieval Europe and Indigenous American tribe members alike. It's also not unusual for contemporary religious groups to sing or recite prayers during a person's final days.
But the Hallowell singers were secular, and therefore unusual, when they began around 20 years ago, around the same time a network of "threshold choirs" — similar a cappella ensembles that sing for the dying — was taking root in California. Soon, Leo was leading workshops around New England for other fledgling hospice choirs; there are now several throughout Vermont. In 2016 she published On the Breath of Song: The Practice of Bedside Singing for the Dying.
In the book, Leo tells the story of Oona Madden, whose mother, Bridget, was 83 and dying of lung cancer in 2011. Bridget had undergone surgery and radiation treatment, but her family eventually decided against more medical interventions "because the interventions were just horrible," Madden said in an interview with Seven Days. "My mother was miserable. It was a really tense, trying, sad time."
Madden's then-daughter-in-law knew of Hallowell, and on a Saturday morning, Madden called. Later that day, a group of singers gently walked into the hospital room where family members had been gathering for weeks. "My mom is Irish, and they sang an Irish song for her, which made her smile a little bit. You could see that she was listening," Madden recalled.
Those few moments were a turning point for Bridget.
"She made eye contact with every one of us, closed her eyes and never opened them again," Madden said. "I think the singing gave her permission. She stopped struggling and fighting and just became peaceful. It was like they sang her across."
That sense of peace and comfort was what drove Leo to found Hallowell in 2003. She had begun volunteering with Brattleboro Area Hospice the previous year, and her first patient was Dinah Breunig, whose breast cancer had metastasized throughout her body.
For months, Leo had visited Dinah at home, making soup and cookies, hanging out, whatever the family needed. One evening, a group of Dinah's friends from the Guilford Community Church choir came to sing for her; another group showed up a few nights later. Leo, who'd been singing in choirs and choruses since she was a teenager, joined in as they sang "By the Waters of Babylon," "Angels Hovering Round" and other songs.
Fred Breunig, Dinah's husband, recalled that, although Dinah had stopped talking, he could see her mouth moving. When he bent over her, he could hear her singing.
"It was quite moving to see how much the music brought forth in her," he said. Dinah died a few days after the singing. Fred would go on to become a founding member of Hallowell.
Leo and the hospice administrators agreed: The experience of being sung to should be available to any hospice patient who wanted it.
Susan Parris, who's been the executive director of Brattleboro Area Hospice for nearly 27 years, said it reminds her of how she used to sing to her daughter when she was a child.
"It's the most comforting and loving experience," Parris said. When you are terminally ill, she continued, "you're retreating from the world. But singing creates intimacy and connection, which can often be missing when you're dying."
The connection frequently serves the singers as much as it does the dying. Peter Amidon, the Guilford Community Church choir director who led the visit to Dinah Breunig's home, said, "I didn't know another way to say goodbye to a friend who was dying. Singing with Dinah, and for her, seemed like a wonderful way to do that."
Amidon, a choral composer and educator, is one of Hallowell's music directors, along with Mary Cay Brass, who leads several vocal ensembles in southern Vermont and western Massachusetts. To form Hallowell, they drew volunteer singers and songs from their respective groups. Over the years, Hallowell's repertoire has ranged from secular to spiritual — though its members don't ascribe to any single religion — and from upbeat to slow and soothing. It includes songs from American gospel and Appalachian Mountain traditions, melodic chants from Eastern Europe and Africa, standards such as "Swing Down, Sweet Chariot" and "You Are My Sunshine," and hymns such as "I Will Guide Thee."
"There was no 'genre' of songs for bedside singing when we started," Brass said. "We've taken songs we love that seem fitting for this purpose and also song suggestions from the families we've sung for."
Among the singers' favorites are songs in languages other than English. Brass said, "When you're not trying to grasp on to the words of a song, you just feel the music. It's very soothing."
It can also be incredibly sad.
"Singing creates an energy that allows people to let their grief show," Leo said. Madden recalled that when Hallowell singers visited her mother in the hospital, "even the nurses were teary-eyed," she said. "I don't know if it's the words of the song or the community of the song or what it is exactly that creates that sense of peace, but something does."
"Music stops people," said Connie Woodberry, who's been part of Hallowell since its inception. For the family members listening, "you're not thinking about logistics and all the things you have to do next. It's a moment of allowing people to relax, to get into their heart."
It's a physical moment as well as an emotional one, according to Leo. Listeners can feel the vibrations of the voices singing and "the breath and energy of a person whose body is laboring toward departure."
During the pandemic, Hallowell managed a few outdoor sings, standing outside bedroom windows, but mostly its members had no choice but to pause. The calls started coming in again this fall, and Leo hopes that soon there will be more visits like the one with Jeff Shields in 2014, eight days before he died.
Shields, the former president and dean of Vermont Law School, was nearing the end of a long, exhausting battle with mantle cell lymphoma when Hallowell singers came to his home in Guilford. His wife, Genie, observed that the singing "was the epitome of what Jeff was doing: spending his time around people he loved and doing things that mattered to him, as opposed to searching for the perfect shot or medicine or pill or doctor to help him leave his illness."
Genie recorded a brief video of the sing. In it, Jeff is sitting up in bed, grinning, with his daughter next to him, holding his hand. Several of their grandchildren are in the room, along with the family dog, a friend, and seven singers harmonizing on "I Still Have Joy."
Eight years later, Genie chokes up while watching it.
"I don't cry a lot when I look back over our life," she said. "But this film is very emotional. There was something so intimate and loving about it. It was like we were given a beautiful, peaceful gift."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Singing Them Across | The Hallowell hospice choir comforts the terminally ill with music"
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