“Birth and Death: That Edge Between the Worlds”
An Interview with KATHY LEO
Kathy Leo is the founder and coordinator of Hallowell, a hospice choir in Brattleboro, Vermont, that for 10 years has been visiting people near the end of their lives and also offering workshops for singers called to this work.
ROWE CENTER: You’re performing a remarkable service helping people in the sacred passage from living to dying. What was your early spiritual and religious life like?
KATHY LEO: I was raised as a Catholic on suburban Long Island. I didn’t go to Catholic school, but every day I went to Mass, I did catechism, received all the sacraments, communion, the whole works. I loved the ritual of church plus the mysteries and community and feeling of gathering, and the candles and prayerfulness and peace. Those things were very compelling to me always. But what I wasn’t drawn to was feeling fear, a dread about right and wrong, strict rules, a lot of shame. The priest would yell at people if they came in late, and I felt very uncomfortable in his presence. As I got older I saw a lot of hypocrisy in the Church. I started to look elsewhere and think differently. My whole perception of spiritual life was outside the church walls — even at a young age I spent more time looking out the window at treetops or passing clouds than listening to the priest.
R.C.: Was it a crisis for you when you left the church?
K.L.: I was in my late teens when I stopped going. There was a conflict of wanting to be a good Christian girl and to be good in God’s eyes, while inside myself knowing there was Spirit, something other in the world, but not knowing what that was exactly. I really appreciate church communities and appreciate the quiet and the services — I’m not anti-church — but after that time I never embraced a religion again. I was an avid reader and read a lot of different kinds of writing about spirituality, and was interested in Buddhism but never really wanted to be put in a kind of form that was a practice. I was more open than that. I think nature became my place of Spirit. Hiking, kayaking, gardening, being close to the earth felt like the most intimate connection. I feel guided in my life. I would ask God, Spirit, the universe to show me what’s next, give me directions, and it always just happened to me, living different chapters, one floating into the next. I left home, had travel adventures, sailed in the islands, married, became a mother and moved to Vermont.
R.C.: How has that guidance manifested in your spiritual journey?
K.L.: I was a midwife for 10 years, doing home births, and it opened me to God and Spirit in a whole new way. I can quiet myself enough and be still and I’d get messages or visions or insights to give me information about the woman who was laboring, I’d know what she needs and what to do, I’d know if the baby’s okay or not — it’s a deep intuitive listening, and it feels like a guiding for me. I believe and trust that we’re not alone here, and that we have a lot of helpers. It’s the same energy I feel now at a bedside for the dying.
R.C.: How does that work with dying people affect your spiritual life and your understanding of God?
K.L.: Whether it’s a baby coming into the world or a soul leaving the body, it’s a shimmering kind of place, and if there’s anything you can call God, that’s where I see it. At that edge where it’s between the worlds, a thin veil, you feel the mystery so strongly, and everything else falls away, and there’s a truth there. A sense of oneness. And in this practice of bedside singing for the dying, when we leave that space and go back into daily life we feel gratitude, and wanting to give love. Forgiveness comes more easily, and kindness, and joy.
Raised as a Catholic girl, with this concept that God is a man in the sky watching and judging everything I did — that concept has so changed for me. I feel that God is here in this place we are. Whatever God is, is not secret from us. In our work with the dying, sometimes we’ll sing Christian hymns and it gives great comfort; sometimes we sing songs about nature; we meet their spirit wherever they are, without judgment. In the end it’s all the same. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all Love, consciousness, truth.
R.C.: Have there been specific experiences in your work with the dying that touched you most profoundly?
K.L.: There have been hundreds of stories of grace, but I remember one time when an elderly mother was dying, and her daughter asked us to come. They were pretty much estranged; it was a very hard energy. In the hospice room the mother lay in bed, and the daughter sat on the couch across the room. I offered the daughter a place near her mother, but she said no. As we started to sing, the daughter put her face in her hands. I went over to her, and gently put my arm around her shoulder and said, “Why don’t you come over to your mom now?” She let me lead her. She lay down with her mother and wept the whole time, holding her mother as we sang five more songs. I ran into her six months later and she said that the experience had been an epiphany for her, deeper than we ever could have known.
The kind of presence we feel when we are close to someone who is dying is a sacred kind of presence. Sometimes, just before we cross the threshold into the room of a dying person, where grief is almost tangible, we pause and simply say to ourselves, “May I be of service.” In that way, we become open, grounded, and present. This can be a practice in our daily lives as well. Just pause and say, “May I be of service,” and you’ll find yourself in the presence of something that touches and opens your heart.
Kathy Leo, with Mary Cay Brass and Peter Amidon, will present “Bedside Singing for the Dying” on June 5–7.
