Songs of Grief and Gratitude

Two years after my Dad died, I wrote a song that reflected my deep sense of loss.  Enough time had passed that I felt comforted by these thoughts instead of completely gutted by them.  The song wrapped me in an embrace with his essence.  After singing it, I felt like we had spent some time together.   I was grateful for the tears that wet my cheeks, as I had been fearing that I was losing my connection to him as time went by.  The song and the tears were tangible proof that he was still there with me, like a time capsule keeping my memories alive.  

Thirty years later I can still find this song on my guitar and in my heart, accessing a part of my relationship with Dad that would otherwise have been lost to me.  The tears and the feelings I get now, as an adult the same age as he was when he died, are mixed with a sadness for the life he has missed.  I mourn the absence of him during all of my milestones as well as the more mundane moments that seem like nothing but hold everything within them.  I long to know how I would know my Dad differently now.   The song pulls me into this void that is a part of who I am.  It is a space that feels reverent and powerful.    

I am grateful for my lifelong journey with music.  It has helped me know myself and the world in a deep, creative and unique way.  I have gained another part of myself through music.  I am more empathetic and more adept at working through tricky emotional terrain.  I have learned that movement is growth and because music is in constant flow I have worked my way through many hard times.   

As children, we are born musical.  It is how the world fosters this musicality that makes us musical as adults.  I had always been encouraged to sing by my mother.  I loved to sing and she easily recognized that joy.  Singing was the way I made the most noise as a very quiet kid.  It was the best way to make myself heard.   I could be loud, weird, and theatrical; a version of myself that felt boundless.  Music felt magical.  There were entire worlds I could explore, try on for a little while, release and then open another door.   As a young kid I used to sing to my mom as she was cooking in the kitchen.  She always gave me her time and attention and then a monsoon of praise.  She gave me the confidence to be a singer at age 5 that I still feel today.  I sang The Tide is High by Blonde, holding up my number one finger in one hand while the other rested on my hip that swayed back and forth.  I crooned The Sun will come out Tomorrow with the same hope as the orphans from the movie Annie.  A few years after Blonde and Annie I moved on to Prince, Michael Jackson and Madonna.  I sang with Michael Jackson’s one sequined glove, some florescent gummy bracelets and crop tops like Madonna and various purple outfits while singing Prince’s Purple Rain album.    

Years later, my Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer.  He was sick for a year and a half, before succumbing to his illness a few months before my eighteenth birthday.  My parents were divorced.  There was a lot of tension with my stepmother and her kids, making my father’s passing not only painful but muddied by conflict.  

Despite having many caring friends and family members, I felt alone in my grief.   Luckily, music was always there to offer me a shoulder to lean on.   I would listen to the saddest Billie Holiday song I could find and cocoon myself under layers of pillows and blankets.  The tragically sad emotion in her voice was deeply cathartic for me.  Her songs gave voice to the raw emotions I was having, allowing me to feel them in my mind and body.   Those songs were like Vaseline on the deep cracks that fissured my heart, exquisitely soothing, slowly mending me back to wholeness, if imperceptibly so.   

Music saved me at this time when I needed her most.  A door was opened and I fell in.  I flopped on the floor, turned the volume up to 11 and escaped.  When things were really bad, music held me, rocked me, and put me to sleep.  Other days, music kept me caged and I flailed my body around like a trapped butterfly, singing till I couldn’t speak.  

And then music offered me an angel.  It was as though a music ambassador was sent to pull me out of my deep funk, as this was the most musical boy I had ever met.  He barreled into my life on one of the countless days shrouded in a heavy fog, each hour slipping into the next with no signs of clearing.  He stomped and scuffed down the halls of my high school, his Doc Martin’s untied, jeans sagging low, a metal chain connecting his wallet to his belt loop swaying back and forth with each step.  His flannel shirt was opened to a Ramones t-shirt.  With his hair dyed orange,  multiple piercings, and a guitar strapped over his shoulder, he was the poster child for a punk rock misfit.  He played and sang loudly amidst the crowded high school hallways between classes.  Incongruously, the song he played was Faith by George Michael.  

Well I guess it would be nice

If I could touch your body

I know not everybody has got a body like you

Needless to say, I couldn’t look away.   I laughed out loud, not at him but at his outrageous audacity to be different in a world of high school conformity.  For a moment, my worries fell from me like a concrete brick, breaking away the walls that had kept me captive.  Corey was the opposite image of me in every way.  He was bold and joyful, loud and ridiculous and completely in charge of his own destiny.  Music was the super ingredient pulling all of this together.   Corey was the embodiment of music and the bright light I needed for my darkened spirit.  

Corey and I spent all of our time consuming and creating music.  He taught me how to play guitar.  I stumbled through the chords trying to get to the point where I could accompany myself as I sang.  He played the guitar like it was something to conquer.  He would wail on it as  hard as he could as he played songs by The Smiths, The cure and The Ramones.   He played Rudi, A message to you with so much joy I had to sing along, finding my smile as I did.  These were not bands I had been into before meeting him but I was finding something I loved in them.  The action on his guitar was so high making it nearly impossible for me to play but I learned some basic chords as my fingers ached and tore.  

With my deep love of music and some instruction from Corey, I was ready to jump into the endless waters of creating my own sound.   I wanted to get closer, to step into it, to become the music.  I fell deep into a vortex of learning, escaping and discovering what I could do with two instruments, my voice and a guitar.  I bought a cheap acoustic guitar and focused my learning on getting just enough chords to sing the songs I longed to sing.  I sang Jane Says by Janes Addiction, Helpless by Niel Young and Everybody Hurts by R.E.M..

Hours upon hours vanished as more layers of pain began to molt away.  I wrote poems which became song lyrics.  These first renderings were a massive release of emotion that had been bottled up for years.  I had never been able to vocalize my emotions very well.  To sing them out loud was a powerful opening.  I was slowly beginning to understand how I was feeling and how to be in the same room with the emotions that had been previously too raw and scary to face.  The music helped coax my deepest darkest thoughts out into the open.  Cryptically hidden in poetic verse, my feelings could be exposed and released.  They danced before me as I sang and played the guitar.  My songs were both a confession and an absolution that finally brought me some peace.

An unexpected gift that music offered me was a deep and powerful way to connect with other people.  I found that to communicate with others through music was like using senses that I didn’t know I had.  I could have an intimate experience with someone without talking or touching or even knowing them at all.  I found a new way to listen to someone, connect to them and then add to the experience, creating something bigger than either one of us.  

I began playing with some friends who were also learning to play guitar and sing.  There was a group of us building a new community through music.  We met at night in the cemetery and played our songs for each other.  Sometimes we would play all together as a big unruly choir of teenagers in dark shadows of the night.   My close friend Hannah and I found ways to weave our voices together that was like an embrace unparalleled to any hug I had ever experienced before.  We sang the Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine and Sympathy for the Devil in our own style with our voices harmonizing up and down and around each other like a tightly woven tapestry.  

By the time I went to college, music was the way I connected with the world.  I was drawn to people who played and I played for anyone who wanted to listen.  It brought me joy, escape, friends, community and identity.  I wrote countless songs and played them in my dorm room, on the green outside or at parties when music was being played.  

The songs I wrote about my Dad were vessels that held the pain I had been experiencing over the past few years.  I was able to leave some of that struggle behind in the process of writing and playing.  Each time I would play them felt like trying on an old coat of my Dad’s that held onto his scent and memory.  I could feel the love and sadness wrapped up together in the words and melody.  I can still play those songs today and fall deeply into the same emotions.  When I sing them, I feel like I am honoring my Dad and the hard years I spent grieving the loss of him.  Music guided me through those hard times and made me stronger and more prepared for any hard times that would come around the next corner.