14 May 25th–May 31st, 2023 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | music | cafe | film | culTuRe | NighT+Day | feaTuRe | NeWs | OPiNiON | feeDBacK | cONTeNTs | for the whole year and was the leader, and I was so grateful for that.” “The day after he [my husband] died in my living room, nine or 10 women came and sang to me. And I couldn’t tell you specifics — I just remember being so grateful and so touched and felt so loved and supported,” she adds. Wadell echoes these sentiments, adding, “It’s the most welcoming, nurturing group of people that you could be a part of.” Honoring the end of life For Booth, who is less connected with the day-to-day efforts of a choir, she’s often tackling those aforementioned issues with death’s place in our larger culture. “We’ve lost this idea that end of life is a valuable part of human development,” she says. “We focus on child development and becoming independent and raising fami- lies and retirement. But we don’t see the end of life; we don’t talk about it or teach it or study it with that same kind of honoring of its own particularities.” It’s an especially vital issue considering how it directly affects threshold choirs. “There’s a reason why I think more of us are over 55; we have more room in our lives,” Booth says. “I know many of us, when we were busy working full-time or raising families, it would have been hard to commit to regular rehearsals and bedside things.” One of the more obvious reasons for the shift, Booth says, is simple progress. “When we developed this more biomedical and technological way of curing diseases, or saving people’s lives, we went so far in that direction that death became a failure,” she says. “We do every- thing we can to try to stop it.” She adds that we’re a “more material- istic culture — we’re a more individualist culture — and we’re not a collective culture generally.” As such, there tends to be a focus on the joys of life and not its accom- panying, inevitable ending. “We’ve lost our familiarity with the purpose of grief,” Booth says. “In a culture like the U.S., which is a hyper-positive culture ... you can be anything you want to be and just be happy. So you have family systems where somebody’s dying and no one can talk about it. ‘Let’s just stay posi- tive. You’re going to get better, Mom.’” There are also notions about how soci- etal structures have evolved. “In the last 30, 40 or 50 years, we have fewer families living multi-generation- ally,” Booth says. “So now we have people in their 30s, 40s and 50s until they see or might be around people who are dying.” But perhaps the biggest reason, she argues, is that we forget just how powerful grieving is in actively acknowledging life. “There’s this wonderful phrase, the intelligence of grief,” Booth says. “It’s not just a kind of sad mistake that we have to get through it. It turns out that feeling that loss, and being able to go through it and not just shut it down, allows us to also feel more gratitude.” Visit thresholdchoir.org for more infor- mation about threshold choirs and the Phoenix West Threshold Choir. Marilyn Rampley Marilyn Rampley and Cindy Gattorna sing during threshold choir practice in Phoenix. Threshold from p 12
