Bedside Singing Moments

Hearing, Singing, and the Gentle Witness of Music at the End of Life

The First and Last Sense

It’s been said that hearing is the first and last in the use and function of all the human senses. We place headphones on the mother’s belly so children in the womb can hear music. I’m reminded of Hungarian music educator Zoltán Kodály, who once remarked that music education rightly begins nine months before the birth of the mother, emphasizing the communal and environmental influence music has on humans from the very beginning.

I don’t think there’s much resistance to the idea that early musical exposure is important. But do we somehow lose our resolve when it comes to the end of life? Are we equally persuaded about the role of music, then? If we are, maybe we’re not prioritizing or making it part of how we walk with one another through those final days.

Six Weeks with My Uncle

Longtime readers of Musically Speaking may remember past reflections on caring for my uncle after my father’s unexpected illness and death in early 2022. My uncle Rodger, who was single and had no children, had been under my father’s care for some months. When my father died, I had six weeks of caring for my uncle while he was on hospice care. During that time, I played music for him and sang to him. I brought him his favorite guitar and played my clumsy attempts at the songs he once played for me. I even made a few playlists and burned them onto audio CDs to play on a cheap CD player set to shuffle when I wasn’t there.

I called it “Rodger Richey Radio” and used my various audio/visual skills to produce it like an actual radio station might do. It wasn’t just music. I made some scripture playlists too, which I played on loop in the evenings as I left. In his final days, we sang to him, read scripture, and recited some of his favorite poems. The idea was to sing him out of the world with the same gentleness and kindness that welcomed him into it. Below is an audio excerpt:

Let Us Sing Them Home

Three years later, I’ve had more time to reflect on the role of hearing and singing near the end of life. We need to encourage and prioritize singing for and with one another in these final days.

My neighbor passed away last year after a short, aggressive battle with cancer. He had no children and no spouse. My family offered to sing for him. He was a believer, but his caretakers never gave the go-ahead for us to visit and sing by his bedside. We are a daunting group of people when we descend upon a solitary soul. Instead, we gathered in our living room one night, recorded several meaningful hymns a cappella, and sent them to his caretaker, who played the recordings for him in his final days.

More recently, we visited my wife’s uncle, now in the local veterans’ home in what seems to be his last days. We gathered in his small room. My father-in-law, his brother, was with us, and we gently sang a handful of the most well-known hymns from his youth and adulthood. That visit reminded me of the importance of this kind of singing ministry, and I want to encourage others to take it up as they have opportunity.

Let It Be Said of Us

Sing with and to your loved ones. Choose hymns and psalms that remind them of God’s promises in life and death. While they may be cold or uncomfortable during sickness, singing can warm their hearts and do much good. Now, you may think you are ministering to them, and you are. But you’ll find this singing actually ministers to you in much the same way. And in these moments, we’re reminded of our own mortality and how every breath is a mercy, especially when we sing stanzas like these from that well-loved hymn, “Abide with Me”:

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see—
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

I could have posted all of these stanzas. They are all solid in their encouragement and witness. Singing songs like these at a bedside creates a unique kind of fellowship. Where you once shared meals, now these common sung words may be all you can partake of together. And what we sing in those moments matters deeply. Hymns and psalms often speak not only to God but to one another horizontally, where praise and worship songs are almost always vertical in orientation. And so hymns and psalms rehearse the truths of Scripture, sometimes paraphrasing or poetically expanding on biblical themes that carry the hope of the gospel even through those sunsetting hours at the end of life. And when we sing them over and with our loved ones, we give voice to their minds and hearts when they may be unable to sing out themselves meaningfully.

Remember the Bible’s admonition, “To whom much is given, much is required,” and consider how we might apply that to the ministry of bedside singing moments. As we train our children to sing faithfully and richly, we must also teach them to minister through this same gift. This means not just singing in performance mode but offering music as a service in life’s most tender and difficult moments. Singing together in the final days of life is one of the most beautiful and meaningful ways to help build one another up and bear one another’s burdens.

Toward this end, I’ve been encouraged over the last few years to see pictures and videos from groups from sister churches around the country gather outside fellow church members’ homes to sing for those homebound in their last days. I believe we need more of this. If you are raising your family in a home filled with singing and joyful music literacy, then make nursing homes a familiar place, even when no relative lives there. Go at Christmas time. Sing resurrection hymns during Eastertide. Let it be said of us Christians that we sing people into the world, and we sing them out again.