Volunteer vocalist has provided solace to hospice patients for 23 years
Almost every week for 23 years, singer-songwriter Kevin Dunn has sung for the dying and their families.
Every Monday, his voice bathes the halls and 14 rooms of Wellstar West Georgia Hospice in LaGrange with hymns like “Blessed Assurance” and “Sweet Beulah Land.”
For individuals resting on that fragile ledge between Earth and beyond, Dunn’s tunes offer familiarity, comfort and peace.
“It sounded like angels,” said Kitty Matthews Crawford, a LaGrange woman whose grandparents died three years apart at West Georgia Hospice. The first time she heard Dunn’s voice, her “grandaddy” Ralph Matthews was in hospice dying from late-stage Parkinson’s. Delirious and sleep-deprived, Crawford wasn’t sure if she was imagining the music.
“I remember hearing this voice just down the hall and looking at my dad and asking, ‘Do you hear that?’” she said.
As Dunn’s voice got closer, Crawford watched her grandfather’s face soften. His eyes opened for the first time in days. They were beautiful to see after having been closed for far too long.
“There was a peace,” she said.
Three years later, when Ralph’s wife Katherine entered hospice, Dunn was there again. He even performed at their funerals and at Crawford’s father’s funeral, supporting the family through three chapters of grief.
Dunn has performed at roughly 250 funerals and never charged a fee.
A divine calling
Having missed only a handful of weeks in nearly two dozen years, Dunn, a 58-year-old native of Valley, Alabama, credits his consistency as a volunteer to the belief that he is divinely called to do it.
He was a 35-year-old husband and father stuck at a crossroads, both physically and metaphorically, when he heard God’s voice direct him.
Sitting at a traffic light, having just lost his job of 12 years working for Shorewood Packaging, he contemplated what to do next. He was worried about how he would provide for his family, but he sensed his struggles were not as bad as others. His instincts and upbringing told him not to sulk, but to use his time purposefully.
His parents were both gracious givers and longtime educators. His father Arthur Dunn, a math teacher and high school athletic coach for more than 40 years, would often come home from a long day’s work, sit down for dinner and get right back up before touching his food to accept a phone call from a student who needed help with their homework, Dunn remembered.
His mother Ollye spent four decades teaching special education, buying clothes for students in need and driving elderly neighbors to the grocery store.
Dunn didn’t appreciate his parents’ altruism when he was young, but that changed after he grew into an adult.
“My parents made a difference in a lot of people’s lives,” he said.
Dunn wanted to do the same. But for a long time wasn’t sure how. When he got laid off, he saw an opportunity.
At first, he considered singing at a nursing home. He sang in church when he was young and at his sister’s wedding as an adult. Though he wasn’t professionally trained, he knew he had talent. He recorded a three-track EP with a music producer in Stone Mountain who told him he had promise as a performer.
But at that traffic light, it wasn’t fame that called him. It was God’s voice, which directed him with a single word: “hospice.”
No, he thought. Only one thing happens there. People go there to die.
Answering the call
Dunn didn’t feel equipped. But God’s instruction was clear.
He reached out to the volunteer coordinator at Wellstar West Georgia Hospice and asked if he could sing. He had no idea what to expect. He soon discovered the power of song.
One day he stood in the hallway, heard but not seen by patients and their families tucked away in rooms, and sang “Amazing Grace.”
As he finished the last chorus, a woman rushed out to embrace him. She was radiant with gratitude. Her loved one had taken their final breath as he sang.
“This has happened on five or six different occasions,” Dunn said. “I guess I’m just giving people the peace to freely let go during those moments.”
Science backs up his experience. A 2019 analysis published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management found that music therapy significantly reduces pain and anxiety for people receiving palliative care.
Dunn’s gift has blessed the staff at Wellstar West Georgia Hospice, too.
“It chokes me up to even talk about it because it’s such a blessing,” said Sandy Melton, the center’s volunteer coordinator for the past three-and-a-half years.
There have been some difficult days. The suffering of an 11-year-old boy who was in hospice for five months weighed heavily on Dunn. Sometimes he sees patients he knows. LaGrange is a town of roughly 30,000 people and a place where he has also been active on the Troup County Board of Education. He has encountered many familiar faces over the years.
None of those challenging moments made him reluctant to return, though.
“I’ve been blessed with this gift,” he said. “I just really know it’s making a difference in people’s lives.”
Fourteen years in, however, Dunn faced his hardest hurdle. And it involved his wife.
A seat in room 12
For the first 14 years of volunteering, Dunn never sat down. He stood and moved from pod to pod singing.
But in July 2016, he found himself seated in room 12, in the same chair where he had witnessed countless husbands, wives, children and siblings hold their loved one’s hands and watch them slip away.
Dunn’s wife Deborah was dying.
They had been married for almost 20 years and had three children, ages 11, 14 and 21.
Deborah had beaten breast cancer in 2010, but five years later a small spot showed up on her liver. In 2016, following a series of treatments, she was placed in hospice, having lost her mental faculties.
“This vibrant, eccentric, energetic, independent woman,” he said. “To see her not being able to think … that did something to me.”
Dunn sat in the chair beside her and sang. Her favorite was “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”
“Let not your heart be troubled / His tender word I hear / And resting on His goodness / I lose my doubt and fear.
Two days before their 20th anniversary, Deborah died. She was 49.
Dunn questioned God.
How could You bring her here? How could You take my wife after I’ve given so much of myself to this place? he asked.
It wasn’t until a close friend offered him a shift in perspective that Dunn found some calm in the anguish.
“What if those 14 years have been preparing you for this moment?” the friend asked.
Maybe he was right. Maybe it all had purpose, Dunn thought.
He took a month off to grieve, then returned to West Georgia Hospice.
“I knew she wouldn’t want me to stop,” Dunn said.
Today, Dunn owns his own advertising business and also sings at weddings and other events. But almost every Monday, he continues to serenade the center.
Holidays at hospice
Throughout December, while the hospice center is decorated for the holiday and a Christmas tree glows by the fireplace in the lounge, Dunn will sing a mixture of classic hymns and holiday favorites, including “O Holy Night,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Mary, Did You Know?” and “Silent Night.”
The familiarity of holiday carols, which are so often tied to joyful memories, is particularly resonant at hospice, Dunn said. He is acutely aware that when it comes to grieving and loss, the holidays are hard.
He still remembers his first Christmas without Deborah. Traditionally, every year their family had made a huge Christmas morning breakfast with omelets, pancakes and hot cocoa. That year her absence was almost unbearable.
“A piece was missing that had never been missing before,” Dunn said.
He knows how special holidays are. He knows how priceless memories are.
By singing throughout the season at West Georgia Hospice, Dunn hopes he can gift families with memories they can cherish of one last holiday spent together.
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