Saying Yes: To Singing, to Aging, to Life

What Reimagine board member Sue Moldaw discovered when she began singing at seventy-two.

At seventy-two, Sue Moldaw was lifted off her feet by a gust of wind caught beneath her umbrella. She landed on her driveway and broke her arm.

The fracture came after two years that had already included spinal surgery and a double knee replacement. Although her doctor told her she would recover nearly all her mobility, one word lodged in Sue’s mind: nearly.

“Why then,” she writes, “do I suddenly feel profoundly broken?”

And then, amid all of this, Sue signed up for singing lessons.

Sue has served on Reimagine’s Board of Directors for years. She has also spent years accompanying others through illness, grief, and dying, including as a chaplain at California Pacific Medical Center, the first lay Jewish chaplain at Congregation Emanu-El, and a spiritual-care volunteer at the Jewish Home and with the Covid Grief Network. She is also an accomplished writer whose work has appeared in Narrative, Fourth Genre, The Millions, Sweet Lit, Broad Street, and elsewhere.

But she is not a singer. At least, that is what she tells us.

Sue had tried Zoom lessons during the pandemic and quit after two sessions because she could see the instructor wince. This time, she climbed the stairs to a local singing studio expecting humiliation.

At her first lesson, Sue chose Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game,” a song she had heard sung at a dear friend’s funeral. She barely made it through one line before she began crying so hard that she could not continue. Her teacher pushed a box of tissues across the piano and observed, kindly, that it is hard to sing when you are crying.

They tried a different song. By the end of the lesson, Sue was laughing.

This is the shape of the thing, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is close to the center of what we mean by growth after loss.

Growth is rarely a conclusion someone arrives at. It is more often a small, specific, faintly ridiculous decision, made on an ordinary afternoon—and then made again. Sue did not make peace with aging. She took a singing lesson, and then she took another one.

Toward the end of the essay, Sue practices in front of a mirror. “My body sings to my body,” she writes.

There is something quietly radical in that image. A woman who has spent years offering care and presence to others turns that same attention toward herself: her aging body, her imperfect voice, her own aliveness.

Sue does not overcome aging or arrive at some grand resolution. She sings. She laughs. She practices. And then she tries again.

Read her essay. It is short, and it is worth your time.

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