Serenading and Soothing Patients in Portland

c. 2007 Religion News Service PORTLAND, Ore. _ A wedge of hallway light falls into the hospital room. The night tastes like sheets and pills. Day is night, night is day, and the chirps and wheeze of cardiac gear mark the crawl of time. Now comes a human tone, maybe a voice in song _ […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

PORTLAND, Ore. _ A wedge of hallway light falls into the hospital room. The night tastes like sheets and pills. Day is night, night is day, and the chirps and wheeze of cardiac gear mark the crawl of time.

Now comes a human tone, maybe a voice in song _ sweet, airy, ethereal, almost not there at all. It sounds the way some humans might imagine an angel would sound, so maybe this is it, the end. Or, it could be Celest Mack.


She is the dayshift housekeeper, clocked in at 8 a.m.

That means somehow once again, morning is here and life goes on.

North Portland’s Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Health Center employs 3,510 people. Forty work in housekeeping. Mack, 44, is a fifth-floor dayshift housekeeper in the hospital’s progressive cardiac care and intensive cardiac-care units.

Her ID tag says “Patient Service Associate.” Her nearly perpetual smile and speed show how devoted she is to what service can mean. She gets behind her cart and rolls.

“Pushing and singing,” she says.

She sets off through halls and rooms of patients who are recovering from heart problems. She dusts window tops, disinfects a toilet, depresses the handle, heads away from the flush with hymns on her lips.

“This is the day the Lord has made,” and her notes tip like wings in the breeze, and on a bed eyes open. Allen Collins, 54, Northeast Portland resident,hospitalized after chest pains, tells her that when his TV sound is down, he can hear her coming down the hall.

“A lot of grace and joy,” he says.

Born in Michigan City, Ind., Mack sang as a child in the choir of Rock of Ages Baptist Church. She moved to Portland in the 1980s to be with her mother, Bertha, and for the last seven years she’s been a housekeeper in this hospital. She and her husband, Ferrell F. Mack, 59, have six children between them, all grown but for a teenage daughter still at home. Mack likes to cook and sew and sing, sometimes in church choirs. She brings her songs to work in Emanuel’s cardiac care.

“I wake up to say that no matter what you want me to do at the hospital today, Lord, I’ll do it.”

That follows from this daily plan.

“I come to work to work,” she says, “not to play.”

She sings as she goes. In hallway conversations (“I can take any word you have and sing it”), she replies in ad-libbed song and verse _ riffs of personalized encouragement that she blends into the traditionals such as “Amazing Grace,” “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” and “God’s Eye is on the Sparrow.”


She recalls only once that a patient has told her to shush; the man’s wife returned to say that he was just having a grumpy day. If anyone asks, Mack says she does not want to push her faith on anyone. She says that she sings only what she feels, that she loves her cleaning job and that she cannot take life for granted.

“They’re on their backs. I’m on my feet,” she says. “That’s another reason I sing `Lord have mercy.”’

Once a woman was preparing for open-heart surgery. On request, Mack began to gently sing Amazing Grace. Soon the patient joined in, Mack dropped away and the woman sang on.

Another time, as Mack recalls it, a patient heard her passing and began to dance and cheer. Mack went to the gift shop and gave the patient a balloon. Weeks later at home one evening, Mack herself was feeling sad _ “I have bad days myself, I just don’t let it show” _ and the phone rang: It was the former patient calling to simply say thanks, and they sang together on the phone.

A nurse in cardiac care, Sara Hinkeldey, characterizes Mack as “super-efficient” while being there for others: “She takes time to recognize the patients, to acknowledge them.”

One of them, North Portland resident Ray Shipley, 57, jokes that patients might think about reasons to undo their rooms so they’ll catch her songs as she drops by.


“There goes my singing sunshine,” Shipley says.

“Everywhere you go, let your light shine,” she likes to reply, and she moves her cart along.

(Spencer Heinz writes for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.)

DSB/JM END HEINZ750 words

A photo of Celest Mack is available via https://religionnews.com.

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