Imagine yourself frazzled and at wit’s end. Or worse, ill and struggling to recover.
Then imagine gently reclining and breathing deeply, while three apparent angels enter your room, sit down, and softly serenade you into a comforted and relaxed place with just calm, quiet voices. All a cappella. Sounds soothing, doesn’t it?
And if you happen to be facing the end of your life, this scene might even grant you the gift of peace.
Sound impossible? Who has time in this world to do such things for strangers they’ve never met? Especially for free? And visiting the dying is scary, right? Isn’t it contagious? Those singing folks must be from heaven!
This experience is exactly what SLO Threshold Singers (a local chapter of Threshold Choir, International) invoke when they arrive. They attend bedsides in local eldercare facilities or private homes to sing their lullaby-esque songs for the sick and dying population in SLO County who are on hospice services. And they do this beautiful service for free.
Not formal or fancy, it’s just a trio (usually) of men and women who come bearing comfort with their gentle songs of eternal love, remembrance, and peace. Traveling home also features as a theme. And reunification—meeting again. One song has lyrics that use a Rumi phrase: “We are all just walking each other home.”
There’s no talk of death or promised golden streets, and it’s not religious so much as it is spiritual and full of peacefulness. So, any person, of faith or not, can relate to and enjoy the songs and the atmosphere created.
One category of folks who particularly enjoy these songs, in addition to the ill, are the caretakers of the sick and elderly. Caretakers, or caregivers, are often exhausted and over-tired. They give, give, give, every day and often forego their own health needs. Caregiver burnout, or “compassion fatigue” as it is clinically called, is very real. These songs, when sung near the caregivers, also comfort them. So the benefit is twofold.
SLO Threshold Singers, ‘bringing comfort through song in SLO County,’ now brings songs of comfort and peace to all SLO County residents with life-limiting illness.”
If you are lucky enough to experience what SLO Threshold Singers call a “song bath,” you may sit back in a reclining, zero-gravity chair. The singers, music books in hand, sit around you and lull you with their harmonious voices into a deeply relaxed place, full of serenity—a state often difficult to achieve by one’s own devices or meditations. It is a truly peaceful state. Muscles and thoughts relax, furrowed brows release, and breathing is deep. Afterwards, a feeling of being refreshed and revitalized. Like it is possible to start again with a new or improved purpose.
For several years, the only way to hear SLO Threshold Singers was to be a client of Hospice SLO County or to attend the occasional event they might serenade, such as the local remembrance ceremony Light Up a Life. But now, according to leader and director Ruth Baillie, the group is breaking free of the confines of just one hospice agency and is crossing thresholds of its own.
SLO Threshold Singers, “bringing comfort through song in SLO County,” now brings songs of comfort and peace to all SLO County residents with life-limiting illness.