29 Jun Hallowell’s 20th Anniversary
Reflections on 20 Years of Hallowell
by Kathy Leo, founding member
The beginning is always an unknown journey. How can we know what lies ahead, where a path may lead, how an idea can grow and shape, can include and bestow.
Hallowell took its first baby steps in 2003 shortly after a group of friends were asked to sing for Dinah Breunig just days before she died. We visited her twice the last days of her life, in the small house in Putney where she lived with her husband Fred and her 2 daughters, Katharine and Lauren. A group of fellow singers from The Guilford Church choir and other friends from the community surrounded her bed and spilled out of the room where she lay in the comfort of her own home, in the loving arms of her family. Peter Amidon, ever respectful and sensitive, told us to go in quietly and perhaps sing one or two songs and then leave. Dinah’s joy at and receptivity to our visit was so apparent that we crowded into her small room, and sang for at least an hour. Fred held her. Dinah mouthed the words along with us, asked for more. The love, joy and spirit in that room mixed with the heart-breaking-open-grief we all felt knowing Dinah was so close to her departure was a tangible thing. We left Dinah’s bedside wanting more of “that.” Whatever “that” was.
What we experienced as we sang with and for Dinah, with each other in joy and grief, was what Hallowell was to become, though we couldn’t have known in that moment. The story of us began in that small house in Putney and has grown into a movement. By now bedside singers are a common offering from hospices across the country. A deep bow to all who were there at the beginning to shape what we have become; Noree Ennis, who asked me if I would be willing to create something that would make singing available to any client who might be open to such an invitation, Lise Sparrow and Peter Amidon for offering and organizing the sing for Dinah, BAH with Susan Parris at the helm for supporting the idea, Mary Cay Brass and Peter for instantly agreeing to be music directors, to find and teach music. And then and especially and always all of the singers who said yes I would like to visit the dying in our community and sing at their bedside. And yes I’m willing to learn how to be with the dying, with their families. I’m willing to stand close to grief and to feel my own. And yes, I’m willing to practice reverence and presence and respect for everything I may witness and to sing to it with my heart and mind open. We accept.
We accepted the invitations as they came. We taught workshops throughout Vermont, then Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine. We had people come to Brattleboro for workshops from all over the country; the Carolinas, Florida, Texas, California, Iowa, Minnesota. The idea of bedside singing was spreading and we were invited to share our experience. We created workshops and traveled to Washington DC, Indiana, Arizona, Pennsylvania. We shared songs and stories. We helped spread the seeds of what we now understood to be a practice. And we kept learning what worked, what didn’t. We shaped ourselves so that we grew more professional and more comfortable, more tender and more amazed as we visited hundreds of families in our community, taught workshops, made recordings in a studio to have CDs to gift our families and sell to support ourselves. In 2016, On the Breath of Song, The Practice of Bedside Singing for the Dying was published, and another source of guidance was offered to new groups springing up everywhere. We taught at Rowe Camp and Conference Center for 8 years, filling our workshops and sending people home with packets of music, guidelines, broken-open hearts and support to form a hospice choir in their own town.
Our teachers have been the families who opened their homes to us, and trusted us. They are the ones who showed us how to move in and out of the sacred space of dying with grace, with quietude, with compassion and presence. The responses we witnessed, the emotions we caused to surface with our songs, the closeness of families, sometimes the strain, the despair, the love, were all guideposts along our path of development. How could we be our best selves each time we were invited to sing. What songs to choose? What do we want to say? How can we become more attuned, more sensitive, more clear about how to be in this place of mystery and awe, of terror and wonder, with grace.
After twenty years, we are still learning. We are still “practicing” how to be Hallowell. And we are bowing to the community who first welcomed us and helped to shape us to be what we are today, part of a great river of voices across the country, singing people over one breath at a time.