Glenwood Springs resident Lesa Russo is part of a choir group called Bedside Voices of the Valley, a threshold choir.

Threshold choirs are a capella groups that perform songs for people who are currently experiencing or nearing the end of their life.

“We provide the service of comfort and companionship and a sense of peace to family during a time of hardship, or at the threshold of (the patient’s) life,” Russo said. “I called it Bedside Voices of the Valley because I want to paint the picture that we sing at the bedside.”

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Bedside Voices works with hospices and those in comfort care, who are passing at home, or at assisted living centers. Threshold choirs are made up of volunteers.

“We have 11 people, all women,” Russo said. “Sometimes it’ll be just two of us or six of us that go in, depending on what the family wants.”

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All the members of Bedside Voices have experienced loss in one way or another. They’re there to help people pass on and help the family with the passing of a loved one. 

Russo led another group of musicians called Holistic Harmony. The group would go around Valley View Hospital and play music for the patients — a service that lasted for 12 years. 

She had an offshoot of that program called the Harmony Chorus, which did the same thing as the Bedside Voices of the Valley. 

“I myself lost my own son,” Russo said. 

Russo’s youngest son, Nathan, was killed in a motorcycle crash alongside his best friend, Eduardo (Eddie) Medrano, in Silt in 2017. 

“At the time, I was also a radiation oncology nurse at the hospital,” she said. “I just quit everything for a few years. I stopped nursing, I stopped singing.”

Russo’s older son, Jacob, released an album earlier this year called “Taller Than Me” that deals with much of his grief around Nathan and Eddie’s deaths. He recounted the same feelings of everything being put on pause with their passings. 

“Just about three years ago, I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I think I can do this again,'” Russo said. 

Russo said she got the group back together, with some new members, about three years ago. 

“All these gals that I sing with have beautiful, kind hearts and souls. We love singing together and we practice every Tuesday night at the train station,” she said. “The Rocky Mountaineer is generous enough to let us practice in their lobby.”

It used to be hard for Russo to be so near people who were dying.

“Not anymore,” she said. “That’s something that’s never going to go away. I’ll always feel that, but you need to live your life. You can either choose to live your life or choose not to, and I’m here, so I might as well do the best I can and help other people along the way, bring comfort to their people.”

Russo gives the gift of her voice to help not just the people in her immediate vicinity, but as part of Bedside Voices, which is part of the international group of Threshold Choirs. 

Threshold Choirs started in June of 1990 when founder Kate Munger was sitting bedside for her friend, Larry, who was dying of HIV/AIDs. She comforted them both by singing; and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she founded various choir chapters all over the United States. Some, like Russo’s, came up on their own and then joined the Threshold Choirs’ mission.

“Music serves as a bridge from the purely physical temporal body experience to what lies beyond,” Munger is quoted as saying. 

Singing to someone who is passing can help calm the person as they go. 

“We don’t come in for entertainment purposes,” Russo said. “We’re invited into their personal, sacred space at a very vulnerable time, so we walk in quietly with reverence, we walk to the bedside, and a lot of times we’ll invite the family to sing along with us.”

The songs that the choirs sing are supposed to be unfamiliar, but calming. The Threshold Choir chapters around the world write their own songs and then submit them to the international website. 

“The songs that we sing are not familiar to anybody, because when someone is transitioning, they’re leaving this life and going into whatever comes next,” Russo explained. “When we hear music, we remember it, so we don’t want to sing something familiar that will possibly bring them back from their journey that they’re going on.”

Some names of the songs are “I Am Sending You Light,” “May You Be at Peace,” and “You Are Not Alone.” They’re repetitive, which makes it easy to find the harmony.

“None of us are professional singers,” Russo said. “The intentionality that we bring to the bedside is more important than the musicality. They can look at us and feel our love.” 

Bedside Voices has started hosting singing meditations at the train station where people can bring mats and listen to the group sing about positivity and calmness. 

“They forget about the world for a while, with all the media and bad news we hear, and it’s one way to provide self care for themselves,” Russo said. “Our next one is coming up in Carbondale on September 17, at the Helios Center.”

If anyone would like to request the services of the Bedside Voices of the Valley, call Lesa Russo at 970-309-1701 or email her at lesarusso333@gmail.com. 

“The voice is the original instrument. When you’re a baby, you’re sung lullabies and so it’s just in our nature to relate to music, and it’s nice on your way out to have lullabies of a sort,” Russo said.