What Franz Schubert Requested as He Lay Dying

By Amy Cunningham

People sometimes ask me how working with the dead has changed my life. And for a long time, I didn't know how to answer. At first, I said that I was now somewhat less afraid of death, which may be true, but then this response began to seem disingenuous and it sat less well with me. Here is what I know, and experience as a fact: since becoming a funeral director, I've been having powerful experiences with music--sometimes in the hearse, sometimes in the chapel, sometimes just at home--in a way I never have had before. It's like my ears and brain are communing with music and processing it in a new way--as though the deceased person stretched out in the back of the car, or just on my mind in that moment, has greatly enlarged my own personal sound system. I'm receiving music like posted mail, and ferreting out its messages. For this, I am grateful. So perhaps I can inspire you to hear music better also, and connect with all it has to say about life's labored, ecstatic wayfairings.

Here's a wintery, grief-infused, transporting piece of music one might spend a lifetime internalizing. It's Beethoven's String Quartet #14 in C sharp minor, Opus 131. It is forty minutes long, and it's the piece of music that caused composer Franz Schubert to say when he heard it, "After this, what is left for us to write?" Schubert, in fact, later requested that this quartet be played as he lingered, ill and dying in his brother's apartment late in the year of 1827. Classically-trained musicians know this piece well. But you see, I didn't until I began to be attentive to good grieving music. It's melancholy, friends. Some parts are easier to like than others--just like life! What would be your last request? And how does music help you wrap your arms around loss and sadness?