Dying and Becoming as Meaning and Metamorphosis

Music-thanatology is a medical modality with a substantive history.  Transcending mere technique, and asking first for personal transformative inner work, musician-clinicians gradually harmonize and unify three dimensions that were formerly perceived as unrelated.  In bringing palliative medicine, spirituality and music together in a single praxis, we integrate death and dying into the fullness of the human life cycle; lift the patient voice, making it center, not periphery; and link the mystery of mortality with the mystery of becoming.   For many, dying and becoming are experienced as a single potentized continuum, core to the human-making curriculum, not as separate bookends determined by the metrics or optics of vast institutions or federal regulations.  With harp and voice at the bedside of the dying individual, we leave the confines of scientism and become participant-observers.  Serving both physical and spiritual needs of the dying, it is possible to shed notions of stasis in lieu of witnessing. We often witness the crowning moments and utterances of meaning and metamorphosis. 

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Harpist, singer, educator and clinician, Therese Schroeder-Sheker has maintained her triple vocation by simultaneously working in classical music, higher education and end-of-life care.   She founded the palliative medical modality of music-thanatology and its flagship organization The Chalice of Repose Project.  Therese made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1980; taught on the faculties of Catholic University of America in Washington DC and Duke University in Raleigh-Durham; records for American and European record labels such as Sony, Celestial Harmonies and Curve Blue; has worked with the needs of the dying for fifty years; and publishes frequently on the women mystics, music-in-medicine, and contemplative musicianship.  The interdisciplinary nature of her calling allowed her to meet and work with exemplars in both sciences and humanities, and this is how she came to meet, work with and cherish David Peat and the Pari Center community.