It’s a warm morning in suburban Ballina, in northern New South Wales, and Joy Hurnall is lying in a recliner in her lounge room, wearing a pale blue dressing gown and a woollen shawl made by her daughter Cheryl.

Having been discharged from the palliative care unit of a local hospital the previous day, the 92-year-old is relieved to be back home, surrounded by people she loves: her cousin and best friend since childhood, three of her six adult children, and dozens of long-gone relatives smiling down from framed black-and-white photographs in the bookcase behind her.

The small room is full but quiet, the air infused with the gentle voices of three women from Ballina’s Threshold Choir who have come to sing to Joy. She closes her eyes and rests her hands on her lap, listening.

For the next 20 minutes, the women sing four lullaby-like songs with names as soothing as they sound: You Are Not Alone, Love Transcends, Healing Light and You Are So Loved. At one point Cheryl, overcome with emotion, moves into the dining room where a table is set with china teacups and a cake fresh out of the oven. No one speaks.

It’s as if the house is under a calming spell.

As the last song ends, Joy opens her eyes. “That was lovely,” she says. Cheryl hands around tea and cake, then the women say their goodbyes and leave as quietly as they had arrived.

‘We are blessed first’

Founded in California 25 years ago, Threshold Choir is a global organisation that started after founder Kate Munger began singing to a friend while he lay in a coma dying of HIV/Aids, to give herself strength. She found that it comforted her, which comforted him.

“The benefit to us, the singers, has been the big, amazing surprise,” says Munger, who still leads her own Threshold Choir chapter. “We are healed by our songs before the vibrations ever leave our bodies. We are blessed first and then we send out the blessing.”

There are now 185 Threshold Choirs worldwide, including six in Australia: in Sydney (the first Australian chapter, established in 2008), Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Maleny in Queensland, and Ballina. Twelve new chapters were added this year; 29 are currently forming (most in the US), including three in regional Victoria; and there are now coaches available to help those starting new chapters.

The Ballina chapter started in 2020 by “pure chance” says its co-director, Jane Eliott, when she overheard a fellow delegate at a conference in the New South Wales Blue Mountains talking about a group that sings to dying people. A former travel agent, Eliott had long been interested in death and dying and helping others prepare for death, through various community groups. But this was her “lightbulb moment”.

“Right then and there, I thought, ‘I’m going to do that’.”

Weekly rehearsals are held in a church and the group’s musical director, Cathy Ridd, happens to be a priest, but Threshold Choir and its songs aren’t religious in any way, to ensure they are as inclusive as possible.

There are more than 20 members now but only three or four sing to each “client”, invited by a family member or carer, to be unobtrusive and allow the songs to be sung in three-part harmony. Singers are deemed “bedside ready” when they can hold their parts, Eliott says, and they will sing anywhere they are needed: in hospitals, aged care facilities, nursing homes, retirement villages, private homes, even at funerals.

Despite the name, Threshold singers rarely sing to people while they are dying. “We would, but we haven’t so far,” Eliott says. “One woman we sang to died a couple of hours after we were there. Several people we’ve sung to have died within days.” It’s not unusual for the group to sing to someone more than once.

Nor is the free service just for people who are terminally ill, Ridd says. “That’s how it started but it has so many other applications – it can bring immense comfort to anybody suffering in their body, mind or spirit and to their carers.”

It is often the family members who get emotional at bedside sessions, Eliott says.

“They’re holding all this stress and they’re trying to be brave or upbeat for their person, then you come in and sing and it just somehow releases all this stuff. We’ve had people just totally go to pieces [when we start singing].”

There are strict protocols for the singers: they must wear only block colours, no prints or patterns, ensure their phones are off and minimise personal belongings. They also take folding stools. Most regular choirs sing standing; Threshold singers sit so they can be at the same level as the person lying in bed.

They will sing for about 20 minutes, the lead singer using subtle hand signals to indicate which verse to sing next, when to slow down, when to split into their parts, when to end the song, always guided by the client and the family’s needs.

The songs are deliberately repetitive, meditative and easy to listen to, from a library of over 500 written by choir members. To keep things simple and stress-free for everyone, the singers don’t usually take requests “unless someone asks for, say, Amazing Grace and everyone can do the harmonies,” Eliott says.

‘An extreme privilege’

It’s not always stress-free. Dr Ann Staughton, a local GP and member of Ballina Threshold Singers since 2020, says it can be “quite chaotic” singing in hospitals. “We just shut the door, turn the lights down and try to create a little bubble of peace, and the staff are always really respectful.”

For Staughton, who has sung in several Northern Rivers choirs, singing in a Threshold Choir is “an extreme privilege”.

“I am [often] bedside to care for people dying and I’ve worked in a lot of hospitals over the years, making sure people have adequate pain relief and so on,” she says, “but to be on the other side of that, providing a different kind of service … It’s such a privilege to sing quietly and harmoniously from a place of love to people who are really at the threshold of life.”

Eliott also finds the bedside singing uplifting. “There are times when people are upset, and you might feel that, but I don’t carry any of that weight. I just feel grateful that we can be there. At other times, everything is perfect. When we sang at an aged care facility once we were so in sync, all three of us breathing at the same time, it was like being one person singing.”

Singing slows time, when there’s no time left

In April this year, Ballina Threshold Singers sang to 63-year-old Heather Wood in Lismore, northern NSW. The breast cancer she’d had years earlier, and recovered from, had returned. There would no further treatment.

Her daughter Gabrielle was hesitant about inviting three strangers into the family home at such a difficult time, but the experience turned out to be “one of the most beautiful, and most painful, moments of my life”, she says.

“It was all so gracious, so thoughtful, the songs, the people; they were the most beautiful women,” Gabrielle says.

“Time slowed, and that’s so important when there’s not much time left. I can still hear the songs. This was two days before Mum died, and she was in and out of consciousness, but that was the last thing we did together, the last experience we shared, and it was the last time Mum smiled at me.”