Huffington Magazine Issue 49 | Page 46

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-