Personal Stories

Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (Margie)

My Threshold Singing took me to a pediatric ICU. I have long had a yearning to touch and sing to newborns who are waiting to decide which plunge to take, into a lifetime or back into the mists. That cusp between corporeal and eternal is with us constantly. It is our design to slip from one state to another every moment. As modern humans we have habituated to focussing almost exclusively on the physical, "awake" reality. But we are equally alive in our dreamworld and in our spirit-expression. It is not metaphoric to consider each breath as coming alive and each exhalation as a release of the dead part of ourselves. Somehow it does not haunt me to be near someone who is actively dying. It is an honor I am peaceful with. One night I was singing softly to a month-old who was obviously dying, though they did not stop with the hideous number of lines, meds, and monitors attached to his little body. I noticed that I had begun to sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and realized it was a prayer song calling the angels to come and get this child. "Or stay," I said to him, "though it would be heroic of you." Either way the singing makes sense. It softens everything...me, the kid, the nurses.

I became a hospital volunteer at UCSF. I wear a little uniform with a badge. That’s my access past the staff, the bureaucracy, and gets me past my own shyness that had previously kept me from offering to sing at the hospice near my work. That may come later as I get more used to this. So I can go right to a cribside. I pause and silently ask permission to enter the child’s space. There is a delicious camaraderie that can occur between. I need an excuse to sing for my own meditation and they need tender touch and gentle sounds.

I go on Sunday nights after work and spend a little more than an hour with each baby. One will be a new kid each week and the other is "Michael" who was severely beaten. He will be there until the court lets the hospital turn off his respirator. Until that happens, I sing to someone who doesn’t see, hear or feel; so they say. But his skin is warm and I am glad for his company. With the older babies I sing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" or number songs, but with newborns or dying kids I tone or I improvise in my own prayer language. I also make up new melodies for Threshold songs after I first sing them "right" over and over. I slow them down until I find a vibration that causes me to relax and expand into the Timeless Place. It is from there that I actually have something to offer. Compassion and healing emanate from this aspect that we all have access to. If we begin singing before we are relaxed and open we may not be as helpful. Just trust our loving intention, breathe for a few calming, moments and then let our singing heal ourselves. After a few songs the room may feel softer, and the resonance can do its work.