Music to Grieve By

 

            There’s a soundtrack for the movie of our grief. In the beginning of grief, there were certain songs that we played over and over to hold ourselves together, to comfort us, remember, and cry. Our playlist changed over the months as we felt the need for encouragement, inspiration, and challenge. And there are those specific songs that turn us into a slobbering, blubbering mess even long after we have pieced our life back together. 

Eulogy or Elegy?

 

(photo by Marcia)

 

Funerals tend to be more elegy than eulogy, lamenting the dead rather than celebrating the person’s life as we send them off into the Ever Forever After with a toast and a hearty cheer. 

 

It’s probably a matter of timing. If a funeral happens right after someone has died, we are overwhelmed by feelings of loss, and we’re trying to corral enough positivity and joy to offset our pain. A memorial service held later in the year allows us to remember the person’s entire life. Three weeks after my wife’s unexpected death, I thought I could give Evelyn’s eulogy, but the shock of her unexpected death was still too fresh and raw, and my friend Daniel graciously read my words.

 

Cantus: The Silence of Grief

In Arvo Pärt’s Cantus, a composition for orchestra and Orthodox bells, silence is written into the music. There are times when no musicians are playing, yet in this silence we hear reverberations of the notes recently played. We hear them even though no one is playing.

So it is in grief after a loved one has died. We still hear their voices reverberating in our hearts. We see their shadows moving through our days, and feel brushes of their touch, even though their bodies are physically gone.

Being Creative with Grief

After being batted around by grief for a time, many of us want to take this raw energy, and our new clarity about reality, and be creative with it. We want to regain a measure of control over a force that has been tossing us around for months. I don’t play a musical instrument, paint, dance, weave, or create sculptures, but I do write, and I wrote down every memory, image, insight, and story of my life with Evelyn, and shaped some of them into essays and poems.

 

We take the remnants that grief leaves us, and sew them together in a patchwork quilt with the sinews of our heart. 

 

Gothic Rock Grief: Nick Cave

“grief is also tidal. In time, it can recede and leave us with feelings of peace and advancement, only for it to wash back in with all its crushing hopelessness and sorrow. Back and forth it goes, but with each retreating drift of despair, we are left a little stronger, more resilient, more essential and better at our new life.” - Nick Cave

I hadn’t paid attention to musician Nick Cave until he was quoted in a recent Brain Pickings post by Maria Popova. He is a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and apparently that’s a post-punk or gothic-rock band.

Grateful Dead as Grief Advisors

I didn’t listen to the Grateful Dead when I was growing up in Wisconsin, too busy, I suppose, hiking in the woods. Then I went to college and got serious for a smattering of years. When I moved to California I rediscovered one and found the other.

The Power of Music

Even twelve years after Evelyn died, certain music has the power to take me right back to those early days of grief, as if time has not passed at all. One song takes me into the shock and dislocation of death, while other songs drag me back into the loneliness and despair that didn’t seem to have an end. 

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Writing a Requiem: Liturgizing Grief

Journal entry 7

Thoughts of writing a requiem for Evelyn resurface. I pushed them away earlier because I heard that the stress of composing a requiem after his father’s death is what some think did Mozart in, trying to express the depths of grief and comprehend why the loss was so devastating.

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