The Eventide Singers Bring Peace in the Final Moments

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The Eventide Singers sing to 95-year-old Esther Krebs at the Arbors of Greenfield. Recorder photo.
The Eventide Singers sing to 95-year-old Esther Krebs at the Arbors of Greenfield. Recorder photo.

What a joy these singers must bring to their bedridden, sick and dying audiences.  I read today about the Eventide Singers, who organize singers to visit people in hospice and hospital and sing gently to them.  Simple.

What a calling. What an honor.  And it’s tough getting into this club. They sing in many languages, and they memorize long lists of songs, nearly 60 in all.   Singers research the person who they’ll be singing for, learning who they care about, and what their life was like.  Then sixty times a year, they visit people like Esther Krebs.

This story in today’s Recorder showed the photos and showed the emotion of this kind of a task. Director Joe Toritto, shown here second from right, told the Recorder how ‘you can see a real shift in breathing, an easing, a relaxing. He’s been singing with the group for eight years, and every ‘sing’ is a little different, he said. READ THE ARTICLE

Listen to the Eventide Singers from February 2014