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Music As Medicine
By Lewis Taylor Photos by Janes Shipley
Beneath a crisp, white hospital sheet, a woman’s crumpled form
rises and fialls with each labored breath.She lies unconscious as
her sister, bedside, comforts her with gloved hands. A few feet
away, another woman sits on a black metal stool, holding a large
wooden harp.
The harpist takes a moment to compose herself, looks at the woman
in the bed and begins plucking the brightly coloured strings. The
sound fills the room gradually, like water pouring into a glass.
The music blankets the odd angles of the room, wrapping itself around
the rolling funiture and the linoleum and the clear plastic bag
labeled “drip narcotic.”
As the harpist starts chanting a soft, shallow voice, the sister
dabs her eyes with a tissue, and the dying woman appears to twitch
her nose in response to the music in the room.
THE HARP has long been associated with the pearly gates of heaven.
But for terminally ill patients at Eugene´s Sacred Heart Mecical
Center and their family members, the instrument is more than an
image - it´s medicine, and it works. They sang and played
the harp, and my mother completely relaxed,” says Linda Kraus
of Lake Oswego, who attended two bedside harp vigils at Sacred Heart
while her mother, Betty Risgby, lay dying earlier this year. “It
wa like a little miracle happening.”
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