DYING
TO LISTEN
HUFFINGTON
05.19.13
“Words are good for many things, but they don’t
seem sufficient when it comes to death … music can
reach those places where words alone can’t go.”
tice original songs written for the
dying. The D.C. circle formed in
January, and is one of the newest in a little-known, mainly
U.S.-based network that began
in Northern California 13 years
ago and now includes dozens of
groups across the country.
In the years before launching
the choir, Synakowski was a theater critic, a parenting newspaper
staffer and an editor at a physics
journal. Now an aspiring creative
nonfiction writer, she spends her
days memorizing songs, calling
hospices and hospitals to gauge
their interest in bedside singers,
and placing ads seeking members in coffee shops, churches
and newspapers. But it’s not easy
to find volunteers and she’s just
started to look for friendly care facilities that may house those who
are dying and willing to listen.
“Do not initiate touch. If someone reaches out to you, you can
respond,” she told the men and
women gathered to practice in
April in a massage school class-
room in a nondescript, concrete
office building that donated its
space. It was a Wednesday night,
and the singers, most in their 20s
and 30s, had rushed in from their
day jobs. They included a legal
secretary, a massage therapist and
an acupuncturist. “If someone
asks you for water, or to adjust
them in their wheelchair or bed,
we can’t,” Synakowski said. That’s
up to the nurse. They are singers,
and singers only.
As if it were a worship service,
she opened the meeting with a
testimony, reading a letter from a
woman who recently had another
choir in California sing to her ailing mother who is in her late 80s.
The students had never performed
for the ill or dying, and they needed encouragement and inspiration.
“When you came to our church
and sang, I had more energy than
I have had in many months. When
you and the choir sang to my
mom, I felt your singing was able
to hold a space open that we all
fear. That ‘space’ could be death
or just the struggle of sickness,
and when it’s held open like that,
we are less alone in it ... When