DYING
TO LISTEN
HUFFINGTON
05.19.13
What do they want to hear in their last week alive?
The aim is to steer their minds toward thinking
about the death that will soon surround them.
age the time to get involved.
There are 19 choirs in Northern California, the epicenter of
the bedside singers’ movement.
They’re each aided in one way
or another by Kate Munger, the
founder and executive director
of Threshold Choir. A 63-yearold resident of Inverness, Calif.,
40 miles north of San Francisco,
she’s a lifelong singer and former
elementary school music teacher.
Munger, too, remembers the
first time she realized the power
of song at death. It was early November in 1990, when her close
friend Larry was dying of AIDS.
“I found myself doing chores all
morning and was supposed to sit
by him in the afternoon, but was
terrified when the time came,”
recalls Munger. “He was comatose
but agitated.”
She was upset, afraid and confused. So she did what she always
did in times of trouble: She sang.
“I sang the same song for twoand-a-half hours. As soon as I
started singing, he started to
calm,” she says. The song was
Gail McDermott’s “Hello, Moon:”
“There’s a moon/ There’s a star in
the sky/ There’s a cloud/ There’s
a tear in my eye/ There’s a light/
There’s a night that is long/
There’s a friend/ There’s a pain
that is gone/ Long are we waiting
awakening/ Long are we singing
this song.”
It took until 2000, and many
years between of Munger teaching
music to kids, for the first choir
to begin. Based in El Cerrito, Calif., its first client was a terminally
ill friend in her 50s with Lupus.
Split into small groups, the original 15 members sang to her weekly in the nine months before she
died, and she gave them feedback.
Soft, blended voices felt better,
she explained. Singers learned to
read her body language. Even the
smallest twitch of a limb could
mean she was enjoying or put off
by the music. At her death, they
sang to her for hours on end.
Today, Munger leads Threshold Choir full-time as a registered
nonprofit. It has a small part-time
staff, 100 chapters across the U.S.,
Canada and Australia, and a rep-