Music Gives Voice to the Soul
By Rebecca Spencer McCurdy
My position in hospice for thirty years was to recruit, train, assign and support volunteers in the art and science of providing care to terminally ill patients. But when you work anywhere for thirty years you are sometimes needed to take on other tasks.For one short period of time when we were between chaplains, it fell to me to do spiritual needs assessments for new patients. It was in this capacity that I was first privileged to visit James.
James was a man in his 50’s, afflicted with a brain tumor. He was a United Methodist pastor by profession and a kind, articulate man when I first met him at his home. We talked at length about his faith and about where a spiritual leader goes to find his own spiritual care. One of the things he shared with me at that first meeting was that he loved classic old hymns.
A few days after this first meeting, James’ hospice nurse received an early morning call from his wife, tearful and frantic, because James did not seem able to talk to her. The nurse, Renee, asked me to go along with her to visit their home because James’ wife had indicated that he seemed deeply distressed about something and he couldn’t seem to tell her what was bothering him.
We rode together to the patient’s home and when we arrived, Renee went to the kitchen to review James’ meds and hear in more detail what his wife was observing, and I went to James’ hospital-style bed in their living room and kneeled down beside him. He seemed to recognize me, but he didn’t greet me, he simply groaned and thrashed in the bed, as if he were in great agony. While I waited for the nurse to figure out what the physical interventions needed to be, I reminded James that he had told me he loved hymns. “What is your favorite hymn,” I asked him. Again, he simply groaned and thrashed. So, I thought, when in doubt, sing “Amazing Grace.”
I do not have a solo singing voice, but I’ve sung in choirs since I was a girl. I began, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…” and by the time I got to “… that saved a wretch like me,” James was singing with me. His body had stopped thrashing and by the time we got to the second verse… “Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved…” he was harmonizing with me in a rich baritone voice.
We sang the entire hymn... all five verses including “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.” When we had finished the song, James said to me, “Soon and soon.” Fortunately I eventually figured out that what he wanted was to sing the Andre Crouch gospel song, “Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king.” So we sang all the verses of that we could think of including some I’m pretty sure we made up. We sang together “No more dying there, we are going to see the King.”
Perhaps you’ve guessed that what was happening to James was that his tumor had enlarged to impact the speech center in his brain, which was why he could no longer speak. But as I had read, but had never observed before, music is not processed just in the speech center. Rather, it is processed all over the brain, including the hippocampus and the amygdala, where we process our memories. Therefore although James experienced the frustration and horror of no longer being able to speak, he could still sing. As a result, the sudden loss of speech lost some of its terror. In addition, it appeared that after singing, for a brief period of time he could once again speak a few words.
This was my most dramatic personal experience of observing the power of music to set a person free from the isolation of terminal illness, but there are many more documented instances of this happening. We had one patient who was so completely unresponsive to any kind of stimuli that the staff in the facility where she lived believed her to be completely deaf. One of our hospice volunteers, Elisa Stoyle, noted in the patient’s biographical information that she had taught music at a prestigious Ivy League university for many decades, and so Elisa felt compelled to try to bring some music back into her life. We engaged a local harpist to come in and play for this patient and it was as if the dead had come to life again. She didn’t sit up and begin talking in paragraphs, but she suddenly had joy written all over her face and tears streaming from her eyes. She began responding to the prompts of her caregivers and would squeeze her response when someone held her hand. She became a part of the living world again.
If you are interested in knowing more about this powerful phenomenon, I would encourage you to explore documentaries on this topic, many of which are available on the internet. One I especially love is entitled Alive Again, by Michael Rosario-Bennett and starring Dan Cohen and Bobby McFerrin.
I would encourage anyone who cares for someone whose disease process has left them apparently out-of-touch with the world, to try to use music to bridge the chasm between the patient and yourself. Especially if you know what kind of music they have loved in their life… whether beloved hymns or classical pieces or pop hits from their youth… try to use the gift of music to give voice once again to their souls.