by Molly Seale
The songs I learned first were church songs. The others—Itsy Bitsy Spider, Row, Row Row Your Boat, Happy Wanderer— came later. But the songs I learned from the Methodist Hymnal, before I could even read from the Methodist Hymnal, came to me earlier: another part of learning words and an understanding that words conveyed thoughts and emotions which were as well expressed in song as in conversation. This I learned from my father. Mother played the piano, but she couldn’t sing. My father played no instrument, but he had a voice like a songbird, and he loved to sing. He always sang.
Some of my most cherished memories are of him driving, me in the car beside him, on our way to my school, acting classes, dance classes, voice lessons, rehearsals. Better yet were the long road trips from Corpus Christi, Texas, to “God’s Country,” central-east Texas, where my parents were born and raised, where I also was born, and where all of our relatives—every last one of them—lived. Sometimes, and for what reason I don’t remember, we’d take two cars: my mother and brother in one—the new, reliable one, and my father and me in the other—the older, barely held together one.
We often traveled in silence. Sometimes, though, he told me about the cotton that filled the fields and how it was harvested, or he reminisced about his father the farmer, who died young, or the boll weevils, or the cotton gins, or the small, cotton-dependent communities where he eventually worked as a social worker. But the best moments, the most companionable, were when we sang together: Roll Out the Barrel; When The Saints Go Marching In; Swing Low, Sweet Chariot; The Old Rugged Cross; What A Friend We Have In Jesus; and Softly and Tenderly. We roamed through our repertoire, me and my dad. When we exhausted it, we started over or he sang snatches, solo, of tunes he knew, making up the words—which he didn’t know—as he went.
Some years ago, I worked as a hospice volunteer. Earlier, after tending to my dying husband, I found myself desperate to reach out to those who were dying, as well as their caregivers. I enrolled in an exertive and expensive assisted yoga therapy training program with hopes of utilizing my newfound knowledge and expertise, not only through hospice, but other compassionate medical avenues.
But I found this therapy not so successful in practice with the terminally ill. When the dying are dying, they are hard at work dying—not concerned with anything extraneous. Their inner selves fall out, without exploration and manipulation to pull them out.
What I grew to understand is that what the dying need is what the living need: companionship. Someone or someones to accompany them to the edge, to the precipice.
After visiting numerous hospice patients, I began to tote along my cherished Methodist Hymnal. In the last weeks of my late husband’s life, he discussed with our friend, Joan, the music he wanted at his funeral: his grandmother’s favorite, Fairest Lord Jesus; Scott Joplin’s Solace; a hymn from our wedding, Come O Thou Traveler Unknown; Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. On the last day of his life, Joan wished to play these tunes for him on our rickety, impossible-to-tune upright piano, yet we owned no hymnal. A friend dashed to the Methodist Church in town to borrow one, but although the doors to the church were unlocked, she found no one to ask. So she took a hymnal. A red Methodist Hymnal. Only borrowed. Not snitched. Joan opened it to the appropriate pages and played the tunes from it and somewhere found sheet music for Solace and the Bach. A few days later, these tunes were once more played and sung at his funeral. And so after… I couldn’t bear to return the now-defined “stolen hymnal.” And it was that hymnal I took with me to visit my hospice patients.
It seemed regardless of the imminence of death (near or still a few weeks or months away), regardless of the patient’s religious or spiritual persuasions or lack thereof, my pilfered Methodist hymnal was a welcome addition to my visits.
I opened it to my favorites—the childhood, Sunday and Wednesday night Methodist hymn evenings flooding my memory as I sang. After, I moved on to my next favorites, then my least. When every tune I knew was exhausted and I was hoarse, I remembered my father and how he made up words to known tunes. Only in my case, I had the words in the hymnal, but not the tune. So I sang the words with a made-up tune. When that was done, I resorted to my adolescence: songs from The Byrds; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; The Beatles; Joni Mitchell; Judy Collins. And oh, yes, I couldn’t forget Gershwin, Girl Scout songs, musical theatre songs from Gypsy, South Pacific, The Music Man, The Sound of Music, The King and I. I couldn’t stop. And my patients seemed not to mind. They rested quietly, eyes opened or closed, breathing evenly, softly. When I was at last done, if they were lucid, they thanked me.
I live a few miles out of town and during my drives back and forth, I often find the radio or even my favorite music tiring. I opt to travel in silence. But lately, because I discovered I don’t sing so much anymore, I force myself to sing. In my little Prius, I open my mouth and whatever melody or lyric rises up, emerges. Initially, my voice feels and sounds coarse. The high notes no longer come so easily. The words are often out of reach, in which case I make them up. Or just hum or lah-de-dah them. It hardly matters what I sing. At the end of the song, I feel so much better than when I began. I am soothed, consoled, comforted. I am companioned by my own voice, by the words of others—many long gone, and by the melodies of others—most unknown. I arrive home to my quiet piano, out of tune now that the children are gone and no longer play it, and there on its stand rests the stolen red Methodist Hymnal—waiting, patient, beckoning, companioning. Like my father.
Not Yet 3000
by Barbara Martin
Molly Seale has published in Hippocampus Magazine, Hotel Amerika, New Millennium Writings, Connotation Press, Into the Sun, The Write Launch, Humans of the World, Months to Years, Cathexis Northwest Press, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, and most recently, Dipity Literary Magazine. She holds an MFA in theatre from the University of Texas and resides in Makanda, Illinois.
Barbara Martin is an award winning artist who grew up on three continents—and has lived coast to coast. She earned an MBA, is a certified creativity coach and teaches art. Her work is contemporary in style and leans toward the abstract and sometimes surreal or visionary.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 