Hospice and Harmony: Life in a Major Key

What happens when bedside stories we almost never hear step into the light—and sing? In this episode, Ben Kintisch—chaplain, Cantor, and playwright behind “Life Review: The Hospice Musical” —shares how end-of-life moments became songs that make you laugh, weep, and reach for someone you love.

We get honest about what hospice really is: the power of moments over months, the chaplain’s craft of presence, turning private goodbyes into public courage, and how theater can carry truths beyond words. 

Ben draws from journals, bedside memories, and raw emotion, shaping them into lyrics and scenes that hold the weight of these encounters on stage. He reflects on the losses that shape us, the family dramas that surface in final chapters, and the act of transforming intimate goodbyes into music and story. At the center is a brave reminder: claim the days you have, until the very end.

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Pat:

Fill To Capacity where heart grit and irreverent humor collide. A podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference.

Pat:

Hi, I am Pat Benincasa and welcome to Fill To Capacity, Episode #115, "Hospice & Harmony: Life In a Major Key." Today's guest is someone who doesn't just talk about life's big moments. He sings them. Meet Ben Kintisch, chaplain, Cantor music teacher, and the creative force behind "Life Review: The Hospice Musical. "Okay. Think "A Chorus Line" meets "Fiddler on the Roof," but in a hospice, Ben takes real end-of-life stories and turns them into songs that make you laugh, cry and maybe call someone you love. This is not a eulogy, it's a celebration, a reckoning, and a reminder that even in our final chapters, there's music worth singing. Ben, welcome. It's so nice to have you here,

Ben:

Pat. It's so good to be connecting with you again and thank you for that beautiful introduction. Lovely.

Pat:

My pleasure. So let's start by letting listeners know what is "Life Review: The Hospice Musical?"

Ben:

"Life Review: The Hospice Musical" is a new musical comedy, which I created along with some musician friends who were the composers. It is a new work that celebrates love and laughter, and also heartbreaks and sorrows, right? We all know that life has its natural ups and downs, and yes, it's inevitable endpoint. And what we do in "Life Review" is we celebrate all of those fantastic ups and downs. We have patients whose stories are lifted and illuminated through music. So, we get to meet the patients, we get to meet the plus ones, we meet a nurse, and of course, our hero who looks just like me, is the chaplain, Rabbi David. Through him, we get to visit the patients through him. We experience these quiet moments because think about it, in real life, not on stage. You don't get to hear other people's secret stories, the ones they share with chaplains.

Pat:

No, you don't.

Ben:

In the power of theater, you do.

Pat:

But that brings me to my next question. Your "Life Review" was born out of years spent as hospice chaplain, as you're talking about listening, holding space, and bearing witness to people in their final chapter. Now, those moments aren't just about endings, they're about the deepest truths of living. So what did sitting at the bedside of the dying teach you about life?

Ben:

One piece we learn as chaplains in training, and I was a chaplain in training at the time I worked hospice. We learn that moments matter more than days, weeks, and years. It sounds maybe like a little bit of a linguistic trick, but what it means clinically when someone checks into hospice, the clinical definition that gets you into hospice is usually in most states, two physicians agree that you have six months or fewer to live, and then you choose to forego dramatic medical treatment. So, the people who are there in a sense, have on some level accepted that their time here is limited. So maybe the first big lesson is the preciousness of our time, especially when we see its limited nature. That might be thing number one in a less dramatic fashion. It's often been said, if you want some perspective on your age, hang out with an older person and they'll tell you how young you are and how much life you have left in you.

Ben:

So, I'm 45. When I started writing this thing, I was 35. I was pretty young compared to most of my patients. And some of them, depending on their ability to converse, you know, some of, some of these moments really happen via the plus one, you know, the spouse, the adult child, the loved one. But whether it was with the patient directly or the one who was with them, I was always trying to get that conversation going. That would get us quickly to the heart of the matter. Another thing you learn when you train in chaplaincy is it's not just the preciousness of time. You related idea. You don't have a guaranteed return visit. You know, when you work as a clergy person in a faith community, you know, you're the Pastor Johnson, or in my case formerly Cantor Kintisch on payroll at a synagogue or church or mosque.

Ben:

The relationship is still finite, right? Because everyone doesn't last forever. But people kind of come to count on you over years. And if you have a long tenure pat, sometimes you might help with lifecycle events that include a birth and then a coming-of-age passage. And if you last 20 years or more, the pulpit, maybe some of those babies, you might eventually help them get married. That only happens if you're 20 years or more in a pulpit. But saying that that's the opposite of what chaplains go through, especially in an ER kind of hospital situation, you might have to engage with someone, be a source of spiritual assistance, and do so knowing you'll probably never see them again, quick engagement and if necessary, quick release. Now in hospice, it's less dramatic. We don't have the ambulance sirens. It's not shocking. But the need among those who are there, the patients and their loved ones, is profound and intense, and it's why a chaplain is there along with the care team.

Ben:

So maybe a, a third lesson about working with the dying is that the death process and with it, the grief process has a whole community to it. I've heard it described as an ecosystem. So, if you imagine that one person in the chair, let's call him for illustrative purposes, grandpa Joe, if Grandpa Joe is dying, if he's still married, you have Grandma Jill holding his hands. So, she's grieving. Maybe they have adult children. Maybe one of the adult children is on good terms, is Grandpa Joe, but the other child, that's the one who doesn't talk to them anymore. So that's another source of drama, potential conflict that I step into as chaplain. I just wanna visit Grandpa Joe and support Grandma Jill. You quickly learn like a social worker would also learn that family situations are complicated. And death and grief is arguably the most, well, death specifically is the most dramatic point, or one of the most dramatic points in a person's life cycle, life story.

Ben:

And of course, for everyone else, it's a more dramatic moment. So you have people literally coming into the facility, whether it's a hospice or a home situation, people traveling in. We think he's really gonna go now. So like there's all this talk in the hallway, hush hush about, you know, is he gonna make it through the night? No, I think he's got a day. I think he's got a week. You know, should I tell him to fly in all of this drama in real life, pat? It happens again in private, in my show, we're able to shine a light on it a bit more publicly. But you were asking about the lesson I learned in the non-dramatized version. So, I would say this, that every single death makes its own little constellation of stories, of drama, of feelings. And if you wanna look through a, a chaplain lens, its own constellation of spiritual issues or spiritual concerns, a therapist would say, what is the presenting issue?

Ben:

Or what is the, the strongest feeling that we're talking about? Chaplains are trained to, to talk with just slightly different vocabulary. We talk about the spiritual concern. So, the spiritual concern might be, God, I love Grandpa Joe here, and I've been praying for him to get better and he's still dying. That's a concern of someone who might believe in a, um, prayer equals results. Theology or prayer equals healing. I'm not opposed to that theology, but I'll tell you, if you bring that in a literal sense to a hospital or hospice setting, you're gonna be in for a theological crisis.

Pat:

Ben, what you're talking about, I have this image in my mind of a chaplain as a juggler, and you're given these, these balls to start juggling with. One is the unknowns of the family dynamic, the unknowns of the relationships, the duration of time that you're dealing with, the multiple dramas and comments. I mean, what you just present. You gotta have your feet on the ground. I mean, as a chaplain, you really do. Yes, yes. And I'm talking about your spiritual feet on the ground.

Ben:

Pat, I'm glad you appreciate the complexity of the situation. I once had a chaplain teacher say that when you walk into a room, especially in hospice or late-stage elder care, you see one still photograph at the end of a movie that you haven't seen. So, one still freeze frame. So, like if to take the family drama example I brought up, if you are the chaplain and you happen to walk into, as I sometimes did a room with not one, but three people, you immediately have some kind of complex situation going on. Four or more. Oi, that's like a two crowded party in hospice. I would be like, Hey, let's take turns. Right? You know? Yeah, they're tired. But that said, like family drama, you're right, is one you said juggling. I like spinning plates. They're all related performance arts, right? I'll tell you this, I'm an entertainer, so being quick on my feet and that sort of improvisational skill I had in spades before I did any training, what I needed to work on, you said it, feet on the ground.

Ben:

So spiritually that might mean, and this was something we worked on in chaplaincy training, figuring out who I am in my case, who is Ben Kintish as a man of a certain age, uh, certain health as a person within his own family ecosystem. Parentheses challenging issue with this one close issue with, you know, like, 'cause we all have our family dynamics, right? And then yes, we explored in class time at a graduate school level, very sophisticated reading and writing, talking about theological models of suffering, theological models of prayer and healing metaphors for God, which is a great way to think about your relationship with the holy one. One of my favorite exercises, and this is one that I might be interesting to share with the listeners, pat, is to do a, uh, a so-called death timeline. So we did this early in a course, and I did it a second time when I repeated with the same teacher.

Ben:

But essentially you take a piece of paper and turn it sideways, you know, landscape style you make on the left-hand side the date of your birth, and on the right hand side, the current year. So for me, the left would be 1980, the right would be 2025. After doing that timeline, you start by putting in important life events. So, for me, my birth 8/19/93, my Bar Mitzvah, 1998, graduated high school, 22 college, grad school, et cetera. Then you go, marriage, birth of child. Yeah, let's not skip those. Then you go through and you think about all the people you loved and lost. This is where it becomes not a lifetime timeline, but a death timeline. So, for me, I think my first significant death was Grandma Charlotte. When I was age eight or nine, shocking sudden, death, heart attack dropped dead, you know, and that was my first funeral.

Ben:

That was the first time I saw a bunch of grownups cry. A more impactful death was Grandpa Bernie, who died a few months before my bar mitzvah. I loved him very much. I was close with him. To this day, I like to imagine that I carry on his spirit in my adult self. He was very friendly, kind of cheerful friend to all, loved to talk to strangers. So, he died after a really nasty fall and a subsequent hospitalization, which I think informed my future feelings about end of life care. As in he experienced the worst of our modern medicine, 11 months in a hospital, spectacular cost in treasure and time and suffering, just ugly and terrible. So that was a momentous death. And it wasn't just a dot. That was a big important death, right? And of course, the funeral and bereavement that followed in college, I lost a friend, a, a boss who I liked, died after years of hard living, kind of died when he was like 48 or 50.

Ben:

A college friend had muscular dystrophy. So, he died in his thirties as people with, with that horrible disease, often do. A friend of mine from college died by suicide in his twenties. So that was horrible. And I think those were the major deaths I could report about when I did this exercise. And the point of it on one level, I think was to notice that all of us, no matter how old we are, we have lives that are punctuated both by living and dying as in deaths of people that matter. Oh, I should also mention 1986 Challenger explosion. That was like a childhood trauma that I went through along with the children of America. Like, live on tv, let's cheer on the teacher. And then that horrible thing happened. Yeah. Millions of Americans who are now like late forties, early fifties, they had the challenger trauma as elementary, middle, or high school kids.

Ben:

And then I guess for kids of a certain age, 911, I was a college kid when that happened. And my future girlfriend experienced it as a trauma because her dad was in financial services, right? Like he wasn't killed, but people he knew were killed. It wasn't abstract. If you were a certain age, if you lived close to New York City, you knew people who got killed. Actually, one of the heroes of nine 11 was a former friend of my brother. The man with the red bandana, like grew up in my community, saved a bunch of lives. So, like nine 11 and I guess people of a certain older age, maybe their death timeline includes political assassinations. God knows if you were a young, yeah, I mean, your timeline might include the, the horrible late sixties when all the heroes kept getting murdered, right?

Ben:

Kennedy, King, Malcolm X, and on and on. And no matter whether you've thought about it or not, since these death moments happen as we grow and age, they affect us. And so I guess the point of the exercise in training and then getting those feet solid so that we can do well in the visits, it's to think about how we've been through the deaths. We've survived them. We may have grieved and mourned and suffered, but we got through it. That's not to minimize the pain of it, but just to acknowledge that human beings are spectacularly resilient, especially when we are younger. But I like to teach that even people who are older than they used to be can reinvent themselves, can bounce back even after catastrophic losses. I mean, think about how many people you know, and I'm just gonna go out on a limb and imagine that you have friends who have lost spouses, right?

Ben:

Yes. Most of my friends, if they're married, thank God, if they're onto a second spouse, it's by choice, not by death. If you're like beyond 60, some of your friends are gonna, are gonna lose their, their spouses to illness and death. It's devastating, especially if it's a long marriage. And then at a certain point, God willing, if they have friends and maybe therapy and maybe support group, they start, if not dating, maybe just leaving the house, maybe finding hobbies, maybe embracing social clubs. Sometimes you hear about people moving. 'cause it's like, my husband never wanted the cold winters, but I love 'em. So now's my time to go to Minnesota. Right?

Pat:

Your point well taken. Now I wanna go in a different direction here.

Ben:

Let's go. Take me babe.

Pat:

Okay. Music can carry what words alone cannot. It sneaks past the intellect and go straight to the heart. And you've said, "these stories wanted to be songs." When did you realize these bedside moments weren't just sacred conversations, but the makings of a musical that could reach far beyond the hospice walls? When did you know, Ben?

Ben:

It was a growing awareness, not a single aha moment. I was aware that what I was stepping into, each of these threshold moments where you knock and you say, hello, I'm a chaplain, can I visit? I mean, I have that moment in my show again and again. But it's a real moment because when you do rounds, especially when you're an intern, you have to keep visiting to get your hours, like 300 hours of visits a year. It's a lot. And it's always with a knock and a sense of unknowing. And when the person allows you in or their plus one, their loved ones allow you in the stories that unfold. Or if there's no story, sometimes the quiet moments so powerful, even though I didn't know there was a whole musical at first. I knew there was good material for some sort of creative something.

Ben:

It so happens, pat, that I attended seminary in my late twenties, and that was the first time I found success as a songwriter in a co-write situation. A friend of mine in grad school was a great pianist named Lance. He showed up one day at a class and said, I've got music for some Hanukkah songs, but I've got no words. Who writes lyrics? I raise my hand. So that was my first time. And I, and I didn't have experience, I just felt bold. So that had been three or four years earlier to the genesis of the "Life Review" Project. But it was a, it was a moment where I proved myself like I could co-write some, some songs. And I should say that those two or three quirky little Hanukkah songs, they came out nicely. They were funny and cute. And as you can tell, the words pour out of me for better or worse.

Ben:

And when someone is a good talker, if they can be taught at a young age to write like you talk channel, that voice to the paper, that often also translates to a, let's say, facile, poetic voice and perhaps a facile lyrics voice. Because lyrics are technically speaking by some definition poetry set to music. Now, not every song lyric reads nicely as poetry at a poetry slam. And not every poem set to music turns into a nice song, but there's often a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram between lyrics and poetry. To be clear, I did not sign up for chaplain training or hospice specifically because I was like, Hey, this is gonna be good songs. No, I wanted to become a better practitioner of pastoral care so I could serve my congregants well, I saw a great need among my elderly and aging congregation with lots of bereavement and sick call needs.

Ben:

But back to the hospice thing and the story, the stories happened again and again, this is the nature of room-to-room visits. Some stories are dramatic, some are quiet, some are barely a story at all. But I sense from the, from the jump pat, that these stories had great power, that they were like good songs, both very specific and rather universal. And then I started thinking, hmm, maybe these private moments, they could be stories. And they're the apocryphal story that I've told on many a podcasts. I called my wife on the cell phone driving home and I said, baby, I think these stories, they wanna be songs. And she said, get writing. So that night I opened up one of those black and white composition books, and I started scribbling a song that amazingly survives. Now, 12 years later, from the very, very beginning to the current moment, I used as a jumping off point, a title from a poem borrowed with permission.

Ben:

My Mother-in-law is a wonderful poet and author. So, the poem was called "Will It Still Snow?" And I liked this idea of a person imagining kind of life and the world after they go, right? Is, is winter gonna come? Is the snow gonna come? Or is it like lights out, world stops? Which is kind of a big question of the dying person. You can also be specific as you encounter that question, right? And this is where I took the song, imagining a person, but now she's thinking on all of the levels, right? Or singing as it, as it turns out in musical theater, thinking, feeling singing, it's all one thing, right? But one of her questions is, will it still snow when I'm gone? What if my man can't go on? Like, so right away she goes from the big universal to, and what about my husband?

Ben:

Is he gonna survive my death? And of course, the answer is, he'll suffer and he will survive both. That right there is a very common and poignant feeling that I heard expressed in so many ways, often in privacy. Like once the, the spouse leaves her cup of coffee, Cantor, can I have a moment? And then they'll, they'll confess, I'm not worried about death, but I'm worried about her. I'm not worried about heaven or hell, I'm worried about him. You know, he doesn't know how to do the laundry. It's like, well, he's gonna figure it out, or he is gonna pay for a housekeeper, or maybe he'll get married. Like whatever. Like, sorry to make it like that. But you know, a lot of married guys or a lot of married people of whatever gender, if they like being married, they often get married again.

Ben:

And not always, but just as a reminder that even in that moment of I can't imagine my people surviving, and that's the feeling that that fictionalized woman had that I put into that powerful song. The reason why that song, when I share it, pat, not a dry eye in the house, it's not because everyone is a middle-aged white Italian woman who used to be in Massachusetts skiing with her sons. That's the biographical sketch of the fictional person. No, the reason why that song devastates is anyone who has a child has thought about what happens when I die. Or anyone who has a loved one that you worry, you might outlive. Well, are they, what's their life gonna be like without me? Or even if you're not close to your own death, you might think of yourself as the son as the song is being performed, right?

Ben:

Because that song has all the power and the pathos, because she's a woman who's like a little bit too young to die, maybe like forties, fifties, and her adult son is, is at her bedside. So, if you're watching my show and you don't see yourself in the bed, you might imagine yourself as the plus one. That's the power of theater. It's, it's radical empathy where you, through the song, imagine yourself as someone you never would in novels. To quote Harper Lee, "You gotta walk a mile in another man's shoes." I think that's the famous empathy quote from "To Kill a Mockingbird." So in musicals, the, the trick of the songwriter is to try to get that same power, but do it in three and a half minutes. You don't have a lot of time,

Pat:

But you know, Ben, you are bringing up a very, very deep aspect to this. In a culture that hides from death. You walked right into it with music. So what surprised you most in making grief singable? You are talking about people grieving, worrying about their loved ones. Yes. Okay. The kind of things you think about, uh, will they be okay? Who's gonna do this? How is this gonna happen? But we live in a culture that is very youth focused. And conversations about death aren't on the tips of our tongues as a culture or a society. And then what do you do? You go and sing about grief.

Ben:

Yes, that's right. I made a musical comedy about death and dying and grief and all that good stuff. So one, as a creator, I'll tell you, super rich topic, I did a lot of reading, I did a lot of listening to supplement the work that I was doing in class. And what I found is that tons of creative people over the ages have wrestled with this because while only a smidge more taboo than sex it along with sex and love is one of the most universally examined things. I mean, you know, top four is like our ourself, our romantic partner, you know, sexual pursuit, loving all of that is one big group. Our journey away and back home as you know, the hero quest. And then our mortality, how does it end up? Those are sort of the big four for story, if I can be so bolded to categorize all of it off the top of my head. But I think that's basically it. Y'all can add in the comments, the ones I missed. And I'll tell you, as a creator, what has been fun and amusing as I share, it's up to you to share it with the world. So I tell people about the project all the time, and in 12 years of sharing this with increasing skill and boldness, I've gotten every reaction under the sun under. And I'll tell you, um, I know that your famous jewelry is Joan of Arc.

Pat:

Yeah, my Joan of Arc Scroll Medal.

Ben:

And she's a famous figure. And I imagine because you've been sharing the Joan of Arc message, you've discovered the whole world of Joan of Arc reactions. Right? Good, bad. Another weird, interesting, shocking, right? So because of the show I've written and shared about, I know every reaction that Joe Public and Jill Public have about death dying. And they project that on how they react to my show. Some people do a nervous laugh, and I say, you know what? It's a very funny show, but don't worry, we've got some sad stuff too. And if they make an oh my goodness face, I say, yeah, oh my goodness, death and dying is tough, but don't worry, we have some comedy. And sometimes they say, Ben, that's a terrible idea. And I say, you're right, because like, you know, if they've decided it's a terrible idea, they're probably not gonna see it, let alone pay for a ticket.

Ben:

So I'm not gonna try to convince them. But I think those three reactions are a perfect encapsulation of how people feel about death, dying, and mortality. It's a terrible idea, to my mind, is a commercial way of saying no one wants to talk about it, therefore it's a bad idea. Because if I say like, I have a musical about this meat, cute in an interesting part of the world, and it's like kind of got all of the ingredients of an appealing story, no one's gonna say, that's a terrible idea. They might say it's been done, right? But you hear the difference. If someone laughs nervously, that tells me, or reminds me that Jill and Joe Public, as you said in this question, they're not really comfortable with this conversation. That's what nervous laughter tells me. And it reminds me, one of my higher purposes beyond my narrow Broadway dreams is also if we have a bigger purpose, it's to follow the lead of big commercially successful Broadway musicals that deal with tough stuff, "Next To Normal" won the Pulitzer Prize.

Ben:

It's a musical about mental illness and electroshock therapy. And like, if you look close at it, you sort of say, how did that ever get made and funded? I often mention "Fun Home" as one of my personal favorites. It's dark. It's based on the Allison Bechtel graphic novel about a closeted gay man who commits suicide. It's an amazing piece of work. But how the hell did that get funded, Pat? I have no idea. But I know that commercially it shouldn't have worked, but it won all the prizes, it toured for a while. It wasn't "Phantom of the Opera" or "Wicked" like no one that, those are the exceptions to the rule. The blockbuster musicals, however, I give those examples. And then of course, the most famous "Hamilton," a concept that shouldn't have worked, you know, hip hop, multiracial retelling of the founding fathers. Why did that work?

Ben:

I don't know, but it's brilliant. And now everyone in the rear view say, of course it worked, right? So I'll tell you, when I share my concept, both for the specificity of musical comedy and the hospice, I get these range. And what was the last one? So there was the nervous laughter, there was the, it doesn't work, and then there was the sadness and the, the crest fallen. I would say this is our most authentic childlike reaction to grief. And I want to tell you, dear listener, embrace it. When I explained a few minutes ago about your death timeline, if you choose to press pause or later do it when this podcast is over, you know, dry your dishes, finish your dog walk, and then later settle down, it might bring up some really hard stuff that exercise is meant to. I mean, I've told the story of the death of my grandpa Pat.

Ben:

A lot of times it still kind of brings up a little bit of a, a choked up feeling because I loved Grandpa Bernie so much, and he suffered, and I saw it, and it was horrible. Even worse, it wrecked my father for like two years. He was in a terrible depression, which happens sometimes to people with profound untreated grief. We might call it complicated grief. 'cause in that case, I think my dad might have felt guilty about how his father struggled 11 months in a hospital bed until his difficult death. You know, we adult children want to have, I, it's not exactly a Hollywood death. I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, but a lot of people, when they try to have a conversation about death and dying, a lot of times they say things like, I want it to be peaceful. I wanna be surrounded by loved ones.

Ben:

I'd rather be at home than in a institution. But you know what, to get that, you better have an advanced directive. You better tell your loved ones. Maybe you can link in the comments to some, uh, helpful information, Wikipedia, advanced directives, maybe in Minnesota that have some good resources. But I'll tell you, if you haven't told the loved ones, and if you don't have a power of attorney, the default in most states is the opposite of that. It's put you on as many machines as possible to prolong your life, including CPR on someone who's in their nineties. I'm not trying to be alarmist here, but what I am saying is this is like one of the two little soapbox I get on this. One's more uncomfortable. The other one, the easier one is visit your people. That's an easy soapbox. The more uncomfortable soapbox though, is if you like the idea of a certain kind of death, including something that looks more like hospice rather than hospital, you need to put it in writing in an advanced directive. It's a legal document. It's different in all 50 states.

Pat:

Can I jump up on the soapbox with you?

Ben:

Yeah, please jump. We can dance together. Okay.

Pat:

Healthcare directive between partners. If you live with someone, if you're by yourself, you have children, whatever your situation may be, it is so important to have a healthcare directive, not just at the end of life, but well before. Having one in place means your loved ones won't be left guessing. They'll know your wishes for medical care and end of life decisions, giving them guidance and peace of mind. When it matters, most

Ben:

People need to know about it can't be a secret.

Pat:

Good point, Ben. A healthcare or advance directive is straightforward for listeners in the United States. There are websites like a AARP that have that information and it's state specific, or you create one with a lawyer, then share it with your loved ones. So they're guided by your wishes. By the way, I'm not giving legal advice here, just pointing to resources you can check out. It's really a wonderful thing that you bring up, Ben. It's so important to let people know your wishes.

Ben:

Yeah, absolutely. And then if we pull back from the legal to kind of the connection piece, right? Earlier we were talking about lessons. And I'll tell you one lesson that happened again and again is the power of the visit, the power of the storytelling. Now, I took that to the extreme by writing a whole musical built on essentially the visit and the storytelling interaction. That's what the, the play is all about. The reason why that idea has legs is because the storytelling is everything. When you think about friendship early dating, it's like, oh, tell me about your first job. We are always asking for stories as we get to know each other. I'm a, a teacher, my day job, I teach general music in a school. And when, when I can occasionally reach for a storybook to illustrate a point or share a theme, the kids are in it.

Ben:

They love stories in elementary school, even when they can read chapter books, they still love picture books and certainly adults, whether or not we're still involved in picture book world, I think we love stories more than we necessarily pay attention to, right? What is a good TV show, but a story told in chapters? What is a movie? A movie to me is like a, a cinematic novel. Or maybe a TV over many seasons is a long novel. I don't know. Put aside all of your intellectual snobbery about TV and movies if you have it. And remind yourself how many creative people are involved in telling those stories. And then you can notice how and why it's so impactful. Like, my wife and I brought up, "Friday Night Lights" recently. You ever see that show? No. Go ahead. About football. Oh, it's fantastic. So if you're a football fan in America, and if you've never seen Friday Night Lights, it's streaming, it's fantastic.

Ben:

So, we wanna show our daughter this, this TV show, the specific show is not important, but rather that we bring it up. And then both my wife and I go, Hmm. And we think about this world, it's fictional. They're all made up characters. We know it's fictional. We haven't seen the show Pat in at least a decade, and we both have like a little bit of a crush on the handsome coach, a major crush on the gorgeous wife. Holy moly. It wasn't just about the, the looks of the characters, of course, it was the feel of the show. It captured that magic feeling of being a teenager and feeling like amazing things could happen. It also, I don't know if, if you have a show like that for you, but that was just one that came to mind where like, and it wasn't, yes, the cinematography and the direction, but also the music and of course the storytelling, which brings me back to, that brings, you know, I think part of the reason why sports are so captivating is you have like a whole drama in two or three or four acts, depending on the sport.

Ben:

Every time you go, my daughter just started volleyball. So you go to the game and even for the freshman team, guaranteed three act drama, I guess two acts if you get demolished in straight sets, right? But usually it goes for three and there's the ups and the downs. Are they surging? Who's up, who's winning? And you see it on their faces, are they, you know, they mess up. Oh, they're, they're sad and they're angry, and like the emotion is all over the place. Yeah. It's even more dramatic, of course, with the Friday night lights on tv and in our local high school game, which our daughter experienced just the other night, it's the, you know, the biggest, strongest, possibly most handsome boys in school. I don't know, you don't have to be handsome under the helmet, but big and strong helps. But, you know, it's this whole mythos applied to it. And the story is all week, is our school gonna beat that school? And we're all excited. And it's, there's so much drama to it. So even if you don't care a lick about the drama club, and you're all about football, it's not just the athletic prowess. Because if you were enamored in just prowess, you would be like a weird dude watching weightlifters or something. Right? It's not about the individual strength, it's the pageantry. Yeah. It's the show, and it's the story that gets our hearts going.

Pat:

Oh, absolutely. But I wanna ask you something now.

Ben:

Please do.

Pat:

I'm a visual artist, and in the, in the making of a painting, I can work on it for weeks, months, everything I am goes into that painting. I can work eight, 10 hours a day. I am in that painting. The painting is taking me places I never dreamed of. I had an idea, but somewhere in the middle of that painting, the painting said, no, no, no, no, no, you're gonna do it my way. And all of a sudden you yield to the direction of the painting. And you go, I mean, you just go. And when that painting completes itself and when it's done, I, I'm not the same person.

Ben:

Mm.

Pat:

So I wanna ask you, and as you're doing this songwriting, as you're creating this powerful musical, how has it reshaped you?

Ben:

So there's the nitty gritty of the process, and there's the emotion that I don't know maybe is the, the beating heart behind the songs. So I'll tell you that every time I successfully take idea to quote my hero, Lin-Manuel Miranda, pick up the pen, start writing "Hamilton." When I successfully go from idea to pick up the pen or pencil and start writing, I've already found success. And I think that's kind of step one for the artist of whatever discipline. If you're not yet a professional at your craft, you won't have studio time built in. When you see the people on the Netflix, design documentaries and the behind the music, the accomplished songwriter, like I I read Bruce Springsteen's memoir recently. Like, he spends time writing parentheses, dude's rich, he can afford to, he doesn't need to worry about his light bill. Right? It's sometimes harder to get time in the studio, which is literally expensive in many cases.

Ben:

Or even for someone like me who at one point was an, I'm not sure I can write song songwriter. So one of the key things is to get started. That's so critical. I always encourage my fellow makers of whatever degree of confidence. Most of us are our own worst critic. And I like to teach in terms of songwriting. You need to write fast enough to outright your inner critic. As in you write so quickly that stupid voice, it says it's not good. It can't keep up later when your hand hurts or your pens run out of ink, so to speak. Take a break. Trust. When I say for a song that usually has two or three verses, I will write 10 verses ish worth of material. I'm not being hyperbolic. I write that much. And then I cut and I cut and I cut. And that's the, the polishing of the rough stone into something that's smooth and pretty.

Ben:

I am blessed with a lot of words that helps me. You were asking about the feeling. So that process of sitting and writing, when I do it, it's exhilarating. And as I'm talking to you and smiling about it, I'm reminded I need to give myself the gift of more time scheduled in my life to be Ben Kintish playwright, to be Ben Kintish songwriter and so forth. It's still in fits and starts because honestly, man's still gotta make a living. But that said, while I acknowledge that my ear has been more attuned to the moments inside when the voice says, oh, that's an idea. I'm gesturing to the phone because I have a lot of voice memos where I sing in an idea. I have notes where I thumb in or I speak, you know, I do voice to text and I'll do something like song idea about being on podcasts all the time and dah, dah, dah.

Ben:

And like, just kind of leave it alone, and then later I come back to it. That's a little glimpse into my process. But you were also asking about what is it like if I understood it, my changing feelings in my heart, like through editing, revision all the way through. Yeah. Yeah. I love that painting thing because I think a lot of non-painters are surprised to see that painting on the wall in the gallery and then hear that so and so worked on it for years. You're like, but it's this one painting. Right? People are surprised to hear that some of my songs have been revised over years. The whole project we've been working on 12 years, we're not done yet. But I would say it's the script and the songs are basically fully cooked. But I also know the next time I stand it up for a workshop, I'm gonna have new edits because that's how playwrights work supposedly.

Ben:

Like one of the songs for "Hamilton" was written downtown 12 hours before the off-Broadway premiere. You know, like crazy stuff like that happens with creators. Now, let's go back to the, the feeling piece. When I was processing the early intense emotional experience of being a beginner hospice chaplain, visiting room to room with people, including befriending people who I loved and then would go and die, and then their spouses who I'd befriended would disappear from my life. There was a lot of emotion there. And I discovered that in addition to class time, where we wrote about it and spoke about it, that for me as a young artist, putting the thoughts and ideas to paper was helpful. Not always cathartic all the way, but helpful on some kind of level. And then as I got in more and more into the habit, and this is like that previous idea of giving yourself the chance to the more, and maybe for a visual artist, maybe it's using your sketchbook more frequently and getting into that habit of just drawing and sketching and drawing and sketching.

Ben:

I think for poets, lyricists, playwrights, the more you write words, the better you are at writing words. And when you're not ready to write, you get in the habit of consuming what I call good creative nutrition. A mix of low and mid and highbrow stuff. You know, when I was deep in writing this thing, I was listening to tons of musical theater in general, just to kind of hear it. And I was watching a lot of theater, and then I was also reading about stuff, and I was looking at kids' books, and I was looking at essays for adults, and I was reading heady, philosophical stuff, like the whole low mid highbrow to get my brain thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. And then I never knew when reading something would inspire a song title. And sometimes it resulted in a song title that resulted in a song that was okay, but it didn't make it.

Ben:

Or maybe it was the beginning of a song that never got completed. Or maybe it was a song that made it, made it made, it made it, and then it didn't work in a workshop, and it got put aside. Like that's how creative Genesis goes. But here's the exciting, optimistic feeling that I think you might be able to relate to Pat, is that a work, especially the kind that goes on a long time. Not the song that I write fast in a day, but the musical that took several years to birth. And that has now taken over a decade to develop to where it is now mostly finished, but still not where I want on the journey, still on it journey, right? Each successful performance becomes exhilarating because I'm so proud of it because it's a, it's like a child that I've helped to birth, and as it develops, I'm getting better as a performer because I'm doing the one man show again and again.

Ben:

So my skills are developing. That's exciting for me as a person. I'm 45, I believe. I was thinking the first time I was paid to be a singer, I was 17. So I've been technically a professional singer since high school. And honestly, during that 20 something years, I've never really doubted my skills as a singer. I'm really good. I don't worry about that. But right now I'm coming into my own in all these other ways as a performer, as a entrepreneur, um, empresario, podcast guest, these new things are fun and exciting to explore. I was having this conversation Pat the other day with a music friend about how all music learning is beneficial to all music learning in the way that kind of a balanced literacy approach in school. You know, you read, you write, you listen, you talk. So musicians, it's good for us to sing, to listen, to play our primary instrument, to learn an instrument we're terrible at.

Ben:

I'm all into the ukulele right now. I'm not going far with that thing, but it's good for my musical brain, right? Yeah. So as a performer and a creator, it has been so exciting to take these raw ideas, these intense feelings, some of which up close were scary to take the most dramatic moment in my whole play, Pat, I have a death scene with the character we love the most. Talk about not looking away. We developed this friendship with this lovely, sweet, very elderly man named Mr. Leroy Washington. He's 102 based on a real-life person who was also a hundred plus when I met him. And he and I, the the fictional character and the patient throughout the play, there's this nice progression where a friendship develops. And in the final most dramatic visiting scene, I take out the guitar and I play him a lullaby, and I sing him to sleep.

Ben:

And everyone knows what's happening. And it's so sad. Yeah. And I've performed this with an actor across, we're both sharing tears, and it's real as can be. Or I'm playing it as a one man show, and sometimes I break and sometimes I don't. I don't really force it. But in that moment, Ben Kintish, the performer, kind of falling into Rabbi David Goodman, the fictional chaplain character, but I'm also accessing the memories and feelings of Ben Kintish, a real person. That's what actors sometimes do. And that has been how exciting and powerful to, to have those intense performance moments, but then, uh, that are, they may be small and deeply felt. And then I'll also talk about the bigger, exhilarating. So, in terms of the development of the project, pat, just recently, uh, less than a year ago, I won a big grant from Maryland State Arts Council.

Ben:

And with that funding, I was able to underwrite two public facing performances. I paid for a composer to do some arrangements. I hired professional musicians from Peabody Conservatory. It was amazing. And it's hard to put into words how much my heart was pouring out of my chest to use that clunky metaphor. The first time I heard songs that I'd co-written, performed by five musicians, violin, cello, clarinet, flute, piano. It's called a Pierrot quintet. It's a type of small quintet that's used for like a subtle Broadway arrangement, right? There's no rhythm section. So, the sound is gorgeous. And I heard some of these songs that are small, elegant songs. We, the second song in the play is like an anthem of hospice care called "Live Until You Die. "The first time I heard this song, it was my lyric paired with my friend Jason's music. It was a voice memo, or dude had put the phone up on the keyboard and sung into it and, you know, texted it to me.

Ben:

That's like 10 years ago. Great songwriter Jason. And what he wrote was beautiful, but it was subtle and it was small. Imagine the feeling when I heard that orchestrated for an anthem, anthemic, orchestral sound, violin, cello, swelling. And I will walk with you as you're on your way and like, and the power of the, you talked about the words and the music. So think about that moment in a film where there's no dialogue and the music carries the emotion and tells you how to feel. So there are moments where my orchestrator, who's quite brilliant, shout out to Dennis Erickson, composer extraordinaire, where he put in these lines that no one had heard before where the violin gets to do a da, da da da. And everyone's like, ah. And the cello goes, oh. And everyone goes, oh, you know, that's what a good composer does. They use that palette. You talk artists. So a, a musician, a composer, knows the different colors and flavors of instruments, even when you have a palette of five, five main colors, six, when I pick up my guitar for two songs, and seven is the voice. So those six or seven colors can be woven, blended, so to speak, in different ways that are very beautiful and bring feeling and power to the story.

Pat:

Whoa, Ben, as we get to the top of the hour, I have to ask you, if you could whisper one line from this musical into the ear of every person who's scared of death, what would it be?

Ben:

Well, I'll go one of two ways. The funny version is, spoiler alert, everybody dies in the end. That's our funny opening number. And we laugh about it, but there's an important lesson there. Death and taxes, baby, it's the only thing guaranteed. In fact, as my wife points out, there are some people who never made taxes, but they still die. So taxes not guaranteed death, guaranteed.

Ben:

A less funny version, more sincere perhaps, I am here for you. So live until you die. That's from our second song. And that message is paraphrasing the beautiful words of Dame Cicely Saunders, the British nurse who founded the modern hospice movement in England. So her writings are literally on the wall of most hospices. And I was staring at it and I said, oh, that's, that's good material. And I like wrote it all down in long hand and wrote a song that revisited some of those ideas. So her phrase, "live until you die," that's in her pen. It's tricky to do. But as you said earlier, we don't know our expiration date. We don't know when this thing ends. So you might as well live until you die. You don't want to forego booking the trip because you might.dot do no book the trip because what is literally the worst thing that happens if you drop dead before the cruise?

Ben:

I don't know, maybe it's transferable, maybe it isn't. But no one cares about the cruise at that point. They're planning your funeral, but chances are you will make it to the cruise. So you might as well book it, right. I think a lot of us on the, on the liberal left are having a hard time with paralysis because we're all horrified about the horrors and the terribleness that might come down the pike. So if bad stuff is coming, why get outta bed? But the answer is, if you have decided, because bad stuff might happen, I can't live anymore. Uh, bad guys have won. Or to make it not political again, if the fear of death makes it so that aging and illness is deeply frightening, we're gonna have a hard time being a human person because all of us age, all of us deal with illness and injury.

Ben:

I'm only 45, but I have a so-called old man's body because of old injury, whatever. I may be in touch with some of this stuff a little easier because I deal with chronic pain. But I had a fascinating conversation on this one, Pat with a guy who I believe is 10 years younger. Hell of a good-looking man. He is like a fitness influencer. Holy moly, a specimen. But he and I got real deep on this conversation because he said, you know, Ben, the younger you are and the more fit you are, the less likely you are to look your mortality in the face. Because you believe with enough reps, with the right smoothie that you can look younger than you used to look fit. Right? And it's not just about chasing sex appeal, though the magazines of men's health and, and women's health. A lot of it is, you know, an airbrushed, sexy, aspirational thing.

Ben:

But if you, if you chase the romantic thing on some level, that fitness obsessed culture separate from appearance, a lot of it is about cheating death. Yeah, it is. And that unexpectedly deep moment with I'm blushing, handsome specimen fitness guy, I was happy that it went there 'cause I didn't expect it to. And good for him for being brave. And basically, what he said was an acknowledgement. 'cause I'm 45 and he is 35. It's like, unless you have a parent or loved one in the older generation who's currently ill or has recently died, you might believe it. This stuff doesn't apply to you. Yeah, right. It brings up a very important story from my thirties. I was then working as a cantor. So, I'm guessing, uh, let's say mid to late thirties. At the time my wife and I lived in suburban New Jersey. Our child was in the Jewish preschool, which meant, you know, when you have a kid in preschool, it's like instant friends, the other parents of, uh, your child's age.

Ben:

So, we had this whole circle of, you know, let's call it upper middle class, upper class suburban Jewish families who all sent their kids to school. Most of us, let's say, had living parents who were healthy. And therefore, when there were grandparent celebrations at the preschool, they were crowded. Every little Jewish child would have not one, but often two or three, or if they're lucky, God willing, four grandparents, you get the picture. I had the occasion to officiate at the funeral of a father of a peer. So there I was leading a, we call this a shiva minion. It's a, it's the little prayer service that happens in the home of, of some Jewish people after a loved one's death. So I was called on in my role as clergy person, but I had, I was kind of, you know, I had the yarmulka of the clergy person, but I was also a peer in a room full of men like me, a hundred percent of whom looked stricken.

Ben:

And that death of grandpa so and so I believe we didn't see it coming, which might be even scarier. But honestly the circumstances don't really change it that much. Like more surprising if someone drops dead of a heart attack or gets killed in a car crash. But it's a different kind of terrible if someone has a prolonged battle with cancer or what have you, Parkinson's. Right? But the fact of it was, it was sort of like the first death of a grandparent in our peer group in that community. And all the men were looking around like, holy crap, my dad could be next. I'm being gendered because statistically this is how it goes. Men just have lower life expectancy than women in most countries, certainly in the us. So statistically the men of the older generation will die sooner. And I think for those of us, I'm gonna use us.

Ben:

'cause I am certainly in the sandwich generation. My parents are, one is 80 and one is 78. My wife's older than me, so her parents are both well into their eighties. We are lucky. We had four grandparents at our daughter's bat mitzvah. And that wasn't a guarantee because we waited a little bit to have kids, right? We know that nothing's guaranteed. No. And I think to put a button on that story of the JCC dads in the 10 years since then, I'm certain statistically speaking, dads in our cohort have buried more parents or parents. That is our peer group. People who are in their forties and fifties, just we know statistically they are burying their parents. That is the life stage we are in. Or at the very least moving them from their home to assisted living. And it's just kind of how the generations turn over.

Ben:

Now Pat, I happen to be really facile at talking about this stuff because I'm trained as a chaplain, and I've watched others go through it and help them. Little behind the curtain. Truth though, it's not appreciably easier for me as a person because I take off that yarmulke, so to speak. And I'm not allowed to be the chaplain to my parents. In fact, one of the most important things you learn when you train as a chaplain, social worker, pastoral care provider, you are not allowed to do that for your parents. And so when I think about my parents who are going through their aging journey, I have to remind myself sometimes with my wife in private say I'm not the chaplain to my parents. I'm not the social worker to my parents. I don't get to tell them what to do, and like I happen to have power of attorney, but only if both of them are incapacitated. As long as one of them still has their wits about 'em, they're still in charge. To say that even though I've written about this, even though I've gone through over a thousand hours of clinical training, I may be able to step into the situation as a performer, as a professional. But in my heart, it is still personally devastating to watch my parents struggle with the vicissitudes of aging because it just hurts. Yeah, when your loved ones struggle.

Pat:

Absolutely. Ben, you remind us that even at the edge of life stories still sing. "Life Review" doesn't avoid death, it meets it with humor, music, and heart. So here's the takeaway. While we're here, let's listen deeply, love fully, and sing like the curtain is about to rise. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on Fill To Capacity.

Ben:

Pat. Thanks for the opportunity. This has been a most wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Pat:

Oh, I did too. And thank you listeners for joining us today on Fill To Capacity. Take care and take care of each other. Bye

Ben:

So long.