When singing for people at life’s thresholds like we do in this choir, we often find ourselves singing for patients who are terminally ill, receiving care from a hospice team: physicians, nurses, social workers, spiritual counselors, CNAs and volunteers. Many times a request for Threshold Choir bedside presence will come through a hospice volunteer coordinator, volunteer or social worker. A hospice patient for whom we sing may be living in their own home, with family members offering caregiving and presence. Or a patient may be living at a fully staffed residential care home, assisted living facility or hospice inpatient unit.
Threshold Choir members come by invitation to these settings, to ‘make kindness audible’, singing in small groups to patients and their families.
If you’re wondering, “what does this look like and sound like, singing bedside for a hospice patient?” This PBS piece created by KQED in San Francisco at the Zen Hospice offers you peek into our bedside role.
As the KQED piece is titled, Threshold Choir “brings songs of comfort to the dying.” Yes, we do. And not only to the dying, but to the people who love and surround them, as well as to ourselves. Singing this way is a reciprocal experience of comfort and life affirming presence.
Singing at Life's Thresholds 