After my wife died, I joined a community choir. It gave me respite from my private grief

The Guardian

15-03-2025

The first person who spoke to me on the first day of choir was a woman who'd sat beside me in the crowded alto section. She leaned my way and said a little bashfully, 'I've never done this before. I don't know how to sing.'
I wanted to make the same confession to her, but in that moment I figured it'd be better to project something more like reassurance. 'We'll be fine,' I said from a place of certainty that I wasn't entirely certain about.
There must have been 70 or 80 of us in the room. The space we were in – a salon in the Melbourne Recital Centre – was intimidatingly world-class. It was hard not to feel inadequate in it.
Renée, the choir's leader, stepped up to her music stand. She asked us to think about where our voices might best fit, and I drew out a vain half-memory of having once competently crooned some Sinatra somewhere. Where had it been? At some 3am karaoke night in that lane off Little Bourke Street? It was enough in any case to convince me to move over to the bass and baritone section where I figured my voice would at least be better concealed.
I'd come to the choir at the tail end of a turbulent time. Toni and I had been together for over 30 years. We'd endured a serious fracture but had been preserved by being gentle with each other. By the time of the pandemic, we'd healed over the worst of it. Our bloom again into deep, constitutional loving was supercharged by the terrible illness that took hold of her two years later. By the start of 2024, she was gone.
I spent a year pupating in the void of it. And while that time of reconstitution certainly wasn't over, one of the certainties I'd arrived at was that I wanted to make music again.
I wasn't much of a musician. Mostly I noodled around alone at home on the guitar I'd bought on the day Ozzy Osbourne's guitarist Randy Rhoads died in 1982. I liked playing with chords and melodies, but the devotion to learning, practice and performance never stuck.
When Toni fell ill, I stopped playing entirely. Time became a small room. There was no space for indulgences. Even after she died, the best I managed was to notice how much dust had gathered on my guitar. Yet, every so often, I felt the urge to return to music, to the desire to fluidly utter this language that was not language.
When I looked around the choir room, I wondered why each person there had come along. To sing, of course. But I reasoned that singing was an epiphenomenon of something more fundamental. I'd absorbed some of the valid things that had been said and written about the role community choirs could play in promoting wellbeing, especially around the space of grief, but I resisted thinking about that. I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted my joining the choir to have anything to do with Toni's death. It sounded too much like a program.
Soon, Renée was warming us into trying out and trusting our voices. She took us, in our sections, through the parts of an 18th century canon setting of Psalm 137. The Waters of Babylon. My voice, as it landed on the words wept and remember, felt unfamiliarly smooth. Sure even.
It was time, then, to sing all the parts together.
I wasn't conscious over those few short minutes of the song of the technical things I'd later learn about contrapuntal arrangement and the psychoacoustics of harmony that sit somewhere between the physics of sound and its intellectual and emotional apprehension.
What I was conscious of was that I was part of a collectively realised beauty. And that it was as that beauty fell in plaintive harmony on those two words – wept and remember – that I felt the sweetness of living being restored to a memory.
A chill night, three decades ago. Toni and I aren't so far away from where the Recital Centre stands now, walking around the shimmer of the floodlit fountain on St Kilda Road. We're singing together. Just a simple harmony, the kind we'll end up stumbling into by accident over the days and years of the everyday to come. The song is Moon River. She's the alto. I'm the bass. I hadn't crooned Sinatra alone after all.
I remembered all this, and I heard the harmony of the many voices in the room. I heard each singer colouring their own part in it possessed with their own private reason for singing. I heard my own voice and my own desire. And in the totality of it there was a yearning for something more.
And it was in our singing of it that I wept.
David Sornig is a writer based in Melbourne. His most recent book is Blue Lake: finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp