“I Sang At Dozens of Funerals” and I saw The Grief and Saw Joy

Illustration by Hoi Chan

 

By Lauren DePino

The New York Times

Since I first started singing as a little girl, I yearned to become some incarnation of Whitney, Mariah and Celine. By my 20s, I was working as a funeral singer, still pining for the big time. In 2004, I thought I had come exceedingly close to embodying the diva trifecta from my childhood — I auditioned for “American Idol” and made the cut from tens of thousands to 200 hopefuls. I told producers that funeral singing was my steadiest gig, thinking that the job would soon be moving to my rearview.

But when the platinum-haired reality-show producer lifted his slate eyes from his tea, steam rising to his chin, I didn’t expect what came next. “Stick with singing at funerals,” he said. “You can sing a lion to sleep … but you don’t have enough diva potential.” His posh British accent made each word sting more.

I winced. My chest clenched. I thought back to that gangly, intense child who discovered that sounding beautiful was something she could do. I ached to book stadiums. Yet, here was this Hollywood gatekeeper sending me the message that not only was funeral singing a low bar, but the only one I could aspire to.  

When I first sang at a funeral, at age 10, at the invitation of a music teacher, I remember trembling as I headed up the church aisle. But when I heard my own voice ring out, calming yet strong, my anxiety melted away. It was as if my scrawny body was becoming something bigger, something more. In the years that followed, I lost sight of what a sacred, purpose-rich privilege it was to lend my voice to those who were mourning — to let it become theirs, to allow it to give breath to sentiments not yet realized. 

By the time I auditioned for “American Idol,” I had sung at hundreds of funerals. I had worked with dying people who requested, matter-of-factly, that I, then only a teenager, stand with them at their piano and run through a hymn they wanted sung at their memorial. I regularly performed with the same organist, and we named our most requested set list “Standard Operating Procedure,” which included “On Eagle’s Wings” (“Iggle’s,” we joked, in Philly-speak) and “Prayer of St. Francis” (“St. Frank”). For secular funerals, “My Way” and “Hallelujah” ruled.

I had sung at funerals where no friends or family of the deceased showed up, at services mobbed with slouching mourners wearing coats that drooped to their ankles. Some smelled of rain and perfume. Others stiffly handed out tissues. There were children, some restless, some transfixed. I stood close to heartsick mourners and worried that I would not sustain the enormousness of their spiritual weight. I had always preferred singing at funerals over weddings. To blissed-out couples (and sometimes Bridezillas), I was an ornament, a decoration. I didn’t feel as meaningfully alive as when I beamed all my focus toward soothing the bereaved.

But as I grew older, I better understood how singing empowers us, at least fleetingly, to ease the terror of loss. The more I sang at funerals, the performances reinforced the notion that grief is an energy that wants to move through the body, and in our loss-avoidant culture, we’re prone to fight against it. Singing not only helps allow for this process but it alchemizes what grief can become. Who hasn’t felt a shiver of cosmic belonging when standing among other grievers crooning “Amazing Grace”? While singing, it’s as if that vague, amorphous homesickness we bear ebbs away.

In ancient Greece, funeral singers, who were predominantly women, held a hallowed role. The song leader, or chief mourner, was the medium between the bereaved and the dead, and together the singers eased the deceased’s passage to the underworld. Some song leaders ripped out their hair and beat at their chests to honor grief’s unruly, feral side. Over time, some funeral singers saw their role as supernatural and their songs as spells, able to summon back the dead. Eventually, those believers faded away and funeral singing resembles what it is today.

While I didn’t think of my singing as being like an ancient incantation, something magical took place that surpassed my pop-star pursuits. During funerals, it seemed as if I was holding everyone and their shared pain. I envisioned myself raising their grief into song and watching it transmute into numinous light. It dispersed in glimmers and lived on in bright forms. If one person caught a flash of that hope, I had done my job. 

In the psychotherapist Francis Weller’s grief handbook, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow,” he maintains that in ritual mourning, “something inside us shimmers, quickens, and aligns itself with a larger, more vital element.” Just as my singing seemed to transform those who heard it, I was changing. I was taking precious people with me. A mother who lost her college-age son. A friend who lost his partner. A neighbor who lost her father, who had driven me to funeral gigs before I was old enough to drive to them myself.

Later, when I’d encounter my own earth-shattering losses, I would remember many of these grievers, now my companions in sorrow, and think: I saw them cry. I heard them sing. I saw them rediscovering joy. And I knew that I could, too.