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Message from Pastor Peter Marty

Singing as your Last Breath

By Pastor Peter Marty

From time to time, I take the liberty to sing to a dying person. A hymn. A song. A lullaby. It’s nothing planned. The moment has to be mutually right. Singing can be so unexplainably rich and powerful. The flimsy talk we sometimes whisper when in the company of death does not compare. Plus, music can nicely cover those rhythmic wisps of the oxygen machine — those timed breaths that make it feel like the whole world is on life support.

Who can know all of the reasons why singing works so beautifully on the human spirit, or why it creates such solidarity among diverse human beings who do it together. All I know is that singing stirs the emotions of a dying soul like few other stimuli. No one ever seems to care how good the singing is when it is shared with a person nearing the end. It all feels like gift.

But what is it like when the singing comes from the dying person, and not from the friend sitting nearby? I never thought about this until last week. That’s when news broke of the final minutes of Ben Larson’s life. Ben is the Wartburg Seminary student who was killed in Haiti while spending January there with his wife and cousin. (Shortly before Christmas, we interviewed Ben and Renee Splichal Larson for our Pastoral Residency Program at St. Paul.)

All three were inside the St. Joseph Home for Boys in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck. Here’s how Renee described the moment to the ELCA news service:

“We were all together on the same floor,” when the building began to shake, Renee said. “We all kind of panicked and started running. [Cousin] Jonathan and I were together. Ben was hugging a pillar in the middle of the floor. I turned and I saw him, and I saw concrete starting to fall on him. I called for him and started running toward him.”

At that moment the two floors above collapsed on them. Jonathan and Renee were trapped for a short time, but managed to squeeze out onto the roof of the building and called for Ben, she said. The collapsed building continued to shift as the aftershocks continued, Renee said.

The two went back to the place where they had crawled out and called again for Ben. Renee said she heard Ben’s voice. He was singing, not unusual for Ben who loved music. “I told him I loved him, and that Jon and I were okay, and to keep singing,” Renee said. But the singing stopped after he sang the words “God’s peace to us we pray,” she said.

“If he was alive, he would have been calling for help desperately,” Renee said. “Ben spent his last breath singing.”

Imagine that — singing your way into the Kingdom of God! What an awesome way to thank God for the end of an earthly life and the beginning of an eternal life that both came so suddenly. The sweetness of song under the ugly weight of collapsed concrete.

If you think about it, singing has no real practical purpose. It is simply a magnificent outlet for praise. It helps us feel bigger than ourselves. It anchors and orients life like few other experiences. I know of someone who belts out choral music in the shower. I am guessing he feels the harmony of the other singers in his ear as the water ricochets off his head.

Singing together in the car several weeks ago is what helped my son Jacob and his buddy forget that 2,400 miles were rolling beneath their wheels. Teaching hymns to his fellow inmates is how Dietrich Bonhoeffer passed the darkest hours of his Nazi imprisonment.

We should never underestimate the power of song. It does matter that we sing. No sound is more sublime than the human voice. No expression better connects us with those angels on that other shore. Ben Larson would know. This young man spent his last breath singing. And some of us are still in awe of how this one got it so right … on a day when all was, oh, so wrong.

Pastor Peter Marty,

Haiti relief »

Ben Larsen’s music »

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