Caring for the Dying in the Middle Ages and Today

In 1994, I was invited to hold a day-long seminar at the School of Music-Thanatology at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Montana. The school was on the verge of graduating its first class of “contemplative musicians,” men and women who had trained for two years to care for the “physical, emotional and spiritual needs of the dying” with “prescriptive music,” which they delivered with voice and harp in the ecclesiastical modes of the Middle Ages. The invitation came from the school’s founder and dean, Therese Schroeder-Sheker, whom I had met ten years before, after giving my first professional paper on the medieval death ritual at the Benedictine abbey of Cluny. Therese wanted to know if I realized that the monks actually sang their dying brothers through their death agonies. Ever since spontaneously singing to a man dying of bone cancer in a nursing home in Denver some years before, Therese had been thinking about meeting the alienation of death in a clinical setting with the tools of the past. What she heard in my description of the Cluniac death ritual became a touchstone of sorts as she conceived of a new profession dedicated to facilitating a “blessed death” in the modern world. The School of Music-Thanatology was the culmination of her efforts. This talk will explore my involvement in the School of Music-Thanatology over eight years, when I taught a week-long module each semester on the history of death and dying, up until 2002, when the school closed after graduating its fifth class of certified music-thanatologists. The successes and failures of the project, for me and for the students, staff and faculty, illuminate some of the rich possibilities, and difficulties, that can arise from mixing the medieval and the modern in the pursuit of social justice.