My friend Hugh called me from the ICU. “I’m dying faster than I want,” he said. “I wanted more time with you.”  

“Me too,” I replied.  

The next day he returned home to die and I came to visit.

“It seems all we ever get to do in this world is sing God’s song in a strange land,” he said as I approached his side.

“Yep,” I said, “That seems to be the gig — if we’re lucky.” 

I had known Hugh over 50 years, from the time we were freshmen in high school. His father was a preacher and Hugh had done his best to escape the family business. He had been a professor of theater, an actor, a writer. However, when he turned 60, as if destiny had finally caught up with him — or maybe he had just stopped running — he enrolled in a seminary and began to intern as a hospice chaplain.

I remember much of his writing from that time. Not long into his internship he started a weekly blog of poetic musings about how to live with a God who had abdicated and absconded, a Creator who no longer created. I thought it read like a high brow advice column for lovesick devotees. (And truth be told, I still count myself among them.) “We are dying,” he had written. “Almost already dead, but must live immortally. It’s enough to make your head explode.” 

I knew the quip from his deathbed about singing God’s song in a strange land was anything but casual. I had read his splendid meditation on Psalm 137, the one that begins, “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept as we remembered Zion and there we hung our lyres on willow branches. For our captors had taunted us, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’ How can we sing God’s song in a strange land?” 

I realized that Hugh had never ceased brooding over the psalmist’s question and the plethora of prosaic follow-ups that stream from it like water: What does it mean to sing God’s song? Is God’s song a song of home? What’s special about singing it in a strange land? 

I guess I’ll never really know why Hugh greeted me that way. But as I was reviewing some of his old blogs, I discovered one he had written to mark the completion of his first full year as a hospice chaplain. It opens with a line from Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October”:  

O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning

Hugh glossed it this way: “His heart’s truth is still sung, fifty-five years now since it stopped beating. His singing outlives him. But that’s what singing is for. We sing to outlive ourselves, it’s as simple as that.”

Hugh goes on to reflect on his work with dying clients, and suddenly it isn’t so simple. “I do not rescue these people. I do not save them. I can’t fix their predicament or repeal mortality. I do not create, but when I’m on my game I might reveal something — remembering that what is revealed was already there. I might make it possible for their song to emerge, their strange song in a strange land — the land between birth and death that we both are crossing. It’s only in strange lands that the Lord’s song can be sung.”

Was Hugh actually returning to an old puzzle with a new curiosity? Maybe the psalmist’s question still gnawed at him. I read the post again and listened to the couplet which he’d placed immediately after the line from Thomas: “My friend once said that his epitaph should be ‘I Still Don’t Get It!’ Mine should be ‘Wait a Minute! I Was Just Getting the Hang of This!’”

Which put me in mind of a Hebrew poem by Hayim Nachman Bialik, the celebrated father of modern Hebrew poetry, that he wrote when he was 31, entitled, “After My death.” The first stanza reads:  

Say this when you mourn for me:
There was a man – and look, he is no more.
He died before his time.
The music of his life suddenly stopped.
A pity! There was another song in him.
Now it is lost
forever.

Maybe Hugh died knowing there was another song in him. Maybe he sensed that he had not yet sung God’s song and that the strangeness of the land where he lived and of the times through which he passed could not excuse his act of omission. His bedside smile may have masked a confession of failure: “I missed my moment.”

Well, Hugh, just in case that be so, I speak these words to you now, though they might actually be your words addressed to me: Consider that Dylan Thomas drank himself to an early death as he wrote songs, some of which are indeed still sung. But unlike that Welsh troubadour, you helped others who were dying to hear the song their own lives sang. For you lived as a response to the psalmist’s anguished and awe-struck question. And you knew the clue to answering that overwhelming question lay in the impossible fact that the poet had found a way to flip the terrible question into a magnificent song.

You were surprised to learn from the dying that it’s only in strange lands that God’s song can be sung. And even more surprised to sense that your silent presence enabled some of them to hear the song of their own lives. 

I hear your song, my friend. I hear you singing the Godsong at once personal and cosmic, temporal and eternal.

This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on April 5, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.