Catharine DeLong still remembers how she felt after her first music vigil several years ago.
“I can't believe they let me do that,” the Salt Lake City musician said. “I can't believe that they would let me come, sit next to the bedside of this vulnerable person in this moment that is so liminal and so tender.”
DeLong is a harpist with a niche. She plays for people who are dying.
This practice is called music thanatology — named for Thanatos, the Greek god of death. The idea is to offer songs with harp and voice as a form of artistic medicine to calm and comfort those near the end.
Death has become overly medicalized in modern American culture, she said. People shy away from it. Most Americans die slowly, and many end up isolated.
“The geography of their world diminishes until, oftentimes, it is literally the size of a hospital bed,” she said. “And if I can bring something beautiful to them, it tells them they matter. It tells them that they are alive.”
DeLong began playing the harp at age 11, and she grew up to become a freelance classical musician. In 2002, she moved to Salt Lake City to work as a harp salesperson.
By midlife, however, she decided she wanted to do something more meaningful with her music. This was during the Great Recession, a stressful time to be selling expensive instruments. So, she left her job and enrolled in a two-year, Oregon-based music thanatology course.
After graduating, she moved to New York City to put that training into practice. But being an end-of-life harpist is not a common vocation. Only around 100 people do it worldwide, she said.
“I imagined that as I entered the city of New York, they would be so thrilled to have a music thanatologist,” DeLong said. “It was difficult to get an interview with anyone, because no one had ever heard of it.”
She eventually found work with a nursing service that sent her into hospitals across Manhattan. The pandemic brought her back to Utah, and she’s been based in Salt Lake City ever since.
This summer, her work led her to Zion National Park. She’s the park’s June artist-in-residence, taking some time to recharge and soak up inspiration from the red rock cliffs, flora and fauna. It’s where DeLong’s grandfather worked during the park’s early days, supervising explosive detonations for part of the construction of the Zion-Mt. Carmel tunnel in the 1920s.
The residency is a chance to write new music, such as one partially finished song that symbolizes rock formations, trees and people reaching toward the park’s clear blue skies. Dying patients tend to benefit most from hearing unfamiliar music, she said. It helps them let go, rather than hold onto the memories associated with a tune they recognize from years past.
When she plays harp for a music vigil, it is not a performance. She prefers to think of it as an experience. Every time she sits with someone, the soundtrack changes as she reacts to what’s happening in the room.
“There is a little bit of improvisation, but I'm not just messing around,” she said. “There is purpose to the thought process.”
She picks a major or minor key depending on the patient’s state. She syncs the rhythm with their breathing patterns. During and after the roughly half-hour sessions, she has witnessed physiological changes, such as patients relaxing, becoming more responsive and slowing their respiration.
It’s about using the power of music to connect with the humanity of another in a way that other things can’t.
She knows what this feels like from the other side, too. Before she finished her training, DeLong’s mother died, and a mentor came to offer a music vigil for her.
“I was sinking into a dark place,” she recalled. “And so it was so wonderful for me to get to experience it as a family member.”
It can be intense work. She has played for thousands of patients over the years, entering into strangers’ most fragile moments. At times, she’s had to ease her workload for her well-being. After all, this is still a job, and it’s not the type where she wants to skate by with minimal effort.
Being with people in their final days has also given something back.
“I've seen some things that are comforting, that make me feel not afraid” of death, she said. “Maybe I've gotten used to being around it, but it doesn't feel scary to me.”
Death is the great equalizer — one inevitable thing that we all have in common. And if her music can help patients and their families face it, she believes that’s work worth doing.
“It's not depressing to get to walk into a room and bring something beautiful, bring something that honors the person in the bed, that honors the family experience,” she said. “That is a wonderful, meaningful responsibility.”
