Voice of Comfort

When I was young, I was a terrible singer. My mom would yell, “What’s this B on your report card?” and it was always music.

I struggled with singing until about 8th grade, when I started going to church. Church sort of changed my life. I can’t do anything 50% so I put 150% into church. I was in the youth choir, although I don't think they really wanted me.

I asked God, “Please give me a beautiful voice and I'll sing for you for the rest of my life.” That was my daily prayer. I should have asked for Luciano Pavarotti’s voice.

This was a little after my dad died. I was 11, and it was a difficult time for my family. I got my first cassette player then, and I found tapes of Beethoven’s Fifth and Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Listening brought some peace.

Eventually I started getting the hang of it. I could recognize tunes and notes. I started to feel the music, how it can calm you, give you direction, change your mood.

Then my family emigrated from South Korea to the U.S. I was 15, and music was my comfort zone. I spoke very little English when I arrived in Louisiana, but at least I could sing in church. It wasn’t until college that I performed publicly, a solo in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

There was less time to sing during medical school and residency. But when I was an attending physician in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a chaplain asked me to sing at the hospital’s service of remembrance, which honors patients who have died.

It’s not easy to talk about death or comfort someone who is grieving. But it feels more possible through music. For me, music honors God’s creation, all the pain and all the beauty. I sang at the service of remembrance every year as a way of saying the things I couldn’t communicate through words.

Now I sing with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. And I’m hoping we can do a service of remembrance at Elizabethtown Community Hospital this year.

Jun Chon, MD, is the Chief Medical Officer of Elizabethtown Community Hospital and Porter Medical Center. He joined the organization in 2022.