It was the Sunday before Christmas 2019, and I approached the home of Bill and Margie Schaefer after church. I was one of a number of guests that day, and none of us will ever forget that afternoon for as long as we live. Margie and Bill were beloved members of Riverview Church’s choir. So when Margie’s health declined and she entered hospice, the choir decided to visit and sing some Christmas carols together.
The small living room was filled with lifelong friends and warm embraces. As our musician sat at the piano, the whole room shifted. We sang familiar refrains, sunlight and tenderness filled the already full space. This was not just a choir; this was a family.
Choir member Don Gozzard once said the group, “attended each other’s weddings, buried each other’s parents, and lived their lives together.” As we sang together, we fell into a long practiced rhythm, rising and falling in our harmonies. In those melodies and harmonies, a fuller sound emerged from the great cloud of witnesses gathered around Margie’s sunlit bedside. The veil between the living and the departed grew thin as voices rang out across the ages. The voices of beloved ones who had already entered the church triumphant were audible within the throng. And we held each other up in worshipful song.
“This is my family!”
Bill sat on the couch beside me as we sang. And at the end of the music, he spread his hands and tearfully proclaimed, “This is my family!” We embraced, wept and sang another song. Margie joined the church triumphant several days later, on December 30, 2019. When we share music with those we love, we will always carry their melodies in our spirits.
I was the youngest singer in the room that day, surrounded by a choir family that had sung together for over 40 years. Many of the saints in that memory have since joined the church triumphant. When I look back, I see all the moments of kindness that led to our gathering. The concerned check-ins after worship, the phone calls and cards.
When we share music with those we love, we will always carry their melodies in our spirits.
When folks asked Bill if they could visit, he would politely decline out of embarrassment over the state of the house. But the choir wouldn’t let this couple avoid the community. We came to them, sang with them, and remembered as a family through lyrics and melodies.
Singing with this group was a gift I stumbled into. I was welcomed into an existing musical kinship that did so much more than worship together. But it was the act of offering music to God in worship that united us amid change, loss and uncertainty.
Riverview Church’s congregation has changed a lot since 2019. Covid hit us hard; we lost 10% of our congregation during the pandemic. Since then, we followed God’s call to re-form ourselves and merge with another congregational family. Yet, even now, music continues to bind us together.
