“MUSIC ALONE SHALL LIVE”
Once upon a time, during those twenty-five years I lived in Canada, I had the great privilege to emcee concerts for fourteen years. They were concerts featuring Canada’s largest theater pipe-organ. I frequently reminded the audience that a sage had once declared, “Music alone shall live.” While doing my homework in preparation for a concert, I found another observation to share with music-lovers. It was to the effect that our lives, our individual lives, are somewhat like movie scenarios, and every life has its own sound-track, its own precise score of music in the background of day-to-day living.
Shortly after I began introducing guest artists and making announcements for the Kingston Theater Organ Society, (still going strong and bringing beautiful music to theater-goers, although the mighty Kimball is housed in a church), I began my work as a palliative care/hospice volunteer in a large general hospital. From my volunteer training course, I learned how volunteers brought comfort to patients through music: by providing radios or cassette players, and even on occasion, by singing to patients, if that was what the patient asked for or consented to. We all know how soothing music can be: it can lull us to sleep as lullabies once did, or it can remind us of special and wonderful times in our lives, times that are so pleasant to recall. Given encouragement by one of the volunteer coordinators, I began to sing to patients. One time that coordinator sang with me, and another time, the nurse attending the patient I was visiting, asked me to join her in singing to a patient.
Music has always been at center-stage in my life. Born in the worst year of the Great Depression, and times then being brutally tough, I was fortunate to have been reared by two sets of foster-parents, as well as my own mom and dad. Both sets of foster-parents were deeply involved with music at the core of their lives. My first foster-mother owned a baby grand piano and played in church and in dance orchestras over thirty years plus. With her guidance, I sang publicly at age three. My second foster-father was the man who “discovered “ Irving Berlin in the early years of the 20th century. He was a song-plugger for a music publisher and happened upon the brilliant composer when the latter was a very young man and serving as a singing waiter on the lower eastside of New York City. Without my Daddy Max’s extolling the merits of “Alexander’s Rag-time Band,” and pushing it into public favor, Berlin might not have achieved fame and fortune at so early an age as he did. One of my sweetest memories is hearing Daddy Max Winslow sing this song to me as a very little girl.
Times spent with the Winslows meant I met many famous and talented musicians. When Daddy Max was shepherding opera-singer Grace Moore’s career at Columbia Pictures, as he had done in her Broadway days, he took me to have lunch with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was about four. Years later, attending the Hollywood Bowl with Max’s sister-in-law, I met Ezio Pinza. I had ushered at the San Francisco Opera House, while in high school, and already heard Pinza in Faust. But six months after my meeting him, his basso profundo voice would delight the world in “South Pacific.” “Aunt Grace” Kahn, wife of composer/lyricist Gus Kahn, provided me with all the formals I would wear to high school and university proms. At age twelve, I had a few singing lessons, and sang in choruses all the way through high school. My brother had a rich tenor voice and sang opera in young manhood. When I began to teach young children, music was a strong part of the curricula All of this recounting is by way of saying my life was always filled with the sound of music.
It should come as no surprise that when I began volunteering in palliative/hospice care, I wanted to bring music to patients for a couple of reasons: music can soothe and inspire, and music evokes precious memories. Especially when patients were restless or very close to death, music seemed most appropriate. Longfellow had it right: “Music is the universal language of mankind.” Of course, if patients were conscious and I could ask permission, I asked to sing to them. If they were comatose, I assumed I would be heard at some level, and that what I was singing would be comforting. This assumption was verified in one beautiful instance I shall never forget.
I was called to the bedside of an elderly gentleman whom I had not met before. He had asked to return to his convalescent hospital from the acute care hospital so that he might die among staff he knew and loved, and who loved him. I gauged his age to be in the late eighties, and chose to sing to him what would have been the “love songs” of his young manhood—popular songs of the 1920’s. I held his hand and sang quietly. His eyes were closed but I was certain he heard me. I knew for sure that he did when he opened his big brown eyes, smiled a little, and squeezed my hand. Ten minutes later he died. I rejoiced, along with the nurses, that I had sung him “on his way.” It was, as Alfred Lord Tennyson said, “Music that gentler on the spirit lies, Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes.” (“The Lotus Eaters”)
My mentor, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, had urged her workshop participants to try singing silently, mentally, to patients when the need for a sense of peace seemed so apparent.
Shortly after I returned from her workshop in 1985, I was with an elderly patient very worried and concerned that he should die before his sister, her husband, and their child had accepted Jesus as their personal Saviour. I urged the patient to leave the matter to the Lord. Then he fell asleep and I sat by his bedside, singing in my mind, “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands.” With each verse, I named the family member about whom he was so worried, singing silently, “He’s got your dear sister in His hands,” and so forth. It was three a.m., and I too fell asleep in my bedside chair. Just as morning came, and I was about to leave, the gentleman woke up, looked at me, and said, “Thank you for praying for me,” yet I had never uttered a word of prayer. I had just sung silently, mentally and intentionally.
My husband Cliff and I went to a floor of Alzheimer’s patients in a beautiful nursing home setting for over nine years. We chose to visit on Saturday nights when we could assemble the patients in the sunroom to view the “Lawrence Welk Show” on a big TV screen. Patients actually sat still for a whole hour, and the nurses remarked afterwards that it was easier to serve snacks and administer medications during this quiet time. Also patients appeared to rest easier during nighttimes after hearing the music of that show for a whole hour. What amazed both of us was that with much of memory gone for most patients, our group could recall the words of and sing along with songs that had not been heard for decades. They even recalled the long-ago verses that introduced the popular choruses of these “hits” of yesteryear. Sometimes women patients wished to dance and would rise and come to Cliff, seeking him to dance with them. A tender visual memory is that of Cliff swaying to the music of Lawrence Welk with a very elderly lady in his arms. Truly, “A friend hears the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fades.” (Source unknown)
The last year in Canada we were active in on-site palliative/hospice care, Cliff resurrected his mouth organ and went about the hospitals and nursing homes and played for patients. He wishes now that he had done much more of that and for a longer period of time. Our favorite palliative/hospice care physician had invited members of classical music groups in to play for patients with much resulting appreciation on the part of the patients and staff. Nurses have told me time and again what a calming has come to their busy schedules when I ventured to sing to patients or Cliff to play his harmonica.
Recently I was with a dear man and his wife, both close personal friends, as death was imminent for the husband. The wife left the room momentarily, and the hospice nurse turned to me and said, “Quick, go to him and say something. He’s dying now.” I moved to the head of the bed, and it came to me instantly to sing to him the strains of Brahms’ Lullaby. Moments later his wife returned and said her loving good-bye to her husband of 56 years. It was love that ushered him out of this world on the wings of music and tender words! So our counsel, based on experience, is this: Music is a tried and true companion when you are asked to look death in the face, remembering of course, that, “Music alone shall live!”
HomePage C.A.'s Essay About the Kennys Related Links Archives