Death waltz

I sat down to write about the songs that help me cope with loss, but I knew that would be a piece that would never mean very much to me. My father died two weeks ago today as I write this, a Monday, and the week that followed would be a difficult one. However, it's not as though a calm, unencumbered life was occurring before. My father was sick for 19 months, and this year, my father's "bad" times during treatment for his colon cancer were worse. Sometimes he'd need morphine and wouldn't be able to speak or interact much, except for the rare protestation to something, a sad muffled response to let you know he was still around, still processing everything he saw before him.

But maybe I'll go back a little bit further. I love music. I spend so much of my energy writing about music, trying recapture the experience of feeling, truly feeling, a great line, or chorus, or guitar part. I never thought that my obsession was anything out of the ordinary until I met people who were surprised and impressed with my own musical knowledge, but then again, I grew up in a house with my father and my older brothers, whose reaction to music was similar to my own. My oldest brother Josh, 7 years older than me, was my first example of listening - to awful, awful music. It was 1989, he was a fan of Janet Jackson and Tears for Fears and most of all Madonna, as were the vast majority of teenagers at the time. Then, my Dad, as he would until his death, listened to Bob Dylan and the Band and Van Morrison, artists we made fun of him for. So far, this is the same story of any children born to parents who, in their teenage years, found a promise and release in that sort of music as it was released. We will never know what it was like to live in a time when this music was the new music of the time.

When I went to college in 2000, my music taste was different from my father's, and then somewhere down the line, it got a little bit closer. I owned many Bob Dylan albums, more than anyone else I know, but less than my father. I have a fondness for the Band and Van Morrison without the same unconditional love and awe of everything they touched. Again, this is not especially the point.

In March of this year, I think, or maybe April, or maybe February, I was home, and my father was not doing well. I was there for a weekend and our interactions were almost all from his bedside. He was in bed most of the day, but would get up on occasion - to shower, to change into pajama pants, to do things that sufferers of colon cancer must do on a daily basis that they too will ask their children to leave the room for. Knowing what he went through at the end, this was actually a relatively functional time for my father.

But there was something else he'd get up to do - put on a cd. Other people might argue with the logic of putting your stereo on the other side of the room when you were sick, I certainly would have mine near me, but Dad wanted to get up to flip through his cd's and pick one. This day, it was The Healing Game, a 90's "comeback" cd of sorts by Van Morrison, and I must use comeback in quotation marks because it was an album, basically, for aging fans like my father who continue to pay attention to his career, and this album had a slightly larger fan base that who you would intuitively think that would encompass.

Dad listened to four or five songs from this record, and I recall hearing "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Sometimes We Cry" for years. This day, Dad put on his socks and played those songs as he walked around the room. When you're sick, walking around a room is something you must plan to do, work up to, think about, tell people about, and then finally do. If you do it like my father did, you push yourself to make it last for four or five songs. The final, of course, being "The Healing Game," to which I may always remember him sliding on the carpet, punching into the air, as though mocking Jake LaMotta preparing for a fight in Raging Bull, a movie for which my old video copy sat by a TV. Who knows when the last time Dad watched that movie was, but I know it was likely in his mind - my father's memory is like my own, and some things stay put.

I want to talk about the word "may" for a minute in the preceding paragraph. I may always remember Dad sliding on the carpet, punching the air, an act which had a certain significance to my father, who probably was in the middle of the knowledge that, finally, he will never recover from the illness that ails him. I can say I may always remember this image in this context because I don't listen to that song on my own. I don't even like 90's Van Morrison. The song is not one of the 8700 or so on my iPod, and will not come up on random. I've now mentioned my Dad's love of the song and album to many people and played it at my Uncle's house while we had a reception for my father's funeral. I thought of this many times, and when an association like that is rehearsed enough times, it forms a memory that is difficult to erase. Perhaps I would have forgotten that had he recovered and played the song in other contexts around the house, as he had for years - while cooking, while talking with me over coffee, playing in the background as we planned our day. Because those things won't happen again, and I will likely not play it, the song will not really have the chance to have its context adjusted.

When I was a teenager, I used to attach songs to all of my friends, and even make lists saying which song reminded me of which friend. Julian, my best friend from high school, was "Man On The Moon" by REM, because he loved REM and I helped him get an email address that referenced it. I think. Now, thinking of those page long lists of songs attached to people I have very little relationship with but remember pretty well, I can't think of any others. Though we often talk about the songs we attach to other people, we are typically using songs from our own lives and forcing them into a context they don't usually fit. It is July now, and many stations and music sites will talk about their "songs of the summer," of which, regardless of your taste in music, the first one that will likely pop in your head is a song called "Summertime," be it by Mahalia Jackson or Sublime or Will Smith. They were smart to force that context on you by putting summer in the title.

I once saw a "Summer Songs" list that included "Sherry Darling" by Bruce Springsteen, whose chorus, with a wailing sax behind it, sings "Well there's a hot sun burning on a blacktop." I can get behind this, that's a wonderful, hot night type of song, but again, the context is forced - I'll also enjoy the song and think of hot nights burning on blacktops in February or November. My friends have songs and artists they love, perhaps less than I love the ones I love, but probably very few things will "instantly remind me" of who they are or our memories; those things we force into place because this is the way in culture that we discuss music - as deeply associated with memory and experience.

Music is, of course, deeply associated with memory and experience, but the length of those experiences retaining in our memory is more of a questionable thing. For example, for years, my friends and I had dance parties in the house some of us rented in Boulder. We'd play "What You Waiting For" by Gwen Stefani or "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," or "Roses" by Outkast - a song which prompted a deep breath and fast-as-you-can sing along to its "Well she's got a hottie's body" lightning-speed bridge in the song's center. We'd play many other songs too, but the truth is even when I hear those songs now, I am not, as writers of music would have us believe, transported back to those nights in those living rooms, though I know and remember those times being wonderful. The song is just a song. I do not remember the clothes I wore on those nights either, the food in the kitchen, the hat my friend Dylan wore, and in a way, all those things are equally relevant.

We speak of music and our memories in a way that feeds our narrativization of our lives. We see our experiences as stories, and we feel saddened that we are no longer having dance parties to Outkast's "Roses" or sharing coffee with our fathers while Van Morrison sings in the background. Music can make you feel experiences of some kind while you listen to it, and so much music has moved me, I would hope that is self evident by now. Yet a song is just a song, and portable as it is, a song is easier to carry with us throughout our lives than the people we love and share experiences with, because experiences happen and vanish into collective storytelling. The song, as Robert Plant reminds us, will always remain the same.

So, when my father died, I had some thoughts that came out in tunes that floated around my head. "Thought you should know Daddy died today/ he closed his eyes and he left here at 12:03." This is what Poe sings at the beginning of "Exploration B," on Haunted, a wonderful album she made dealing with the death of her own father. Easy enough for me to recall, but I had no choice on the matter, and I certainly never listened to that record with my own dad, who would have hated the whole thing. I thought of Dionne Warwick singing "A chair is still a chair, even if there's no one sitting there" in "A House Is Not A Home." I don't know why I thought of that line, maybe others have a better idea. For my father's eulogy, I spoke about Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell" and shared a memory of my father speaking to me of that song's meaning. The association I think of when its mournful guitar begins playing is especially sad, but that now perhaps has more to do with writing a eulogy relating to that song. And this forever will not be the case. I played Dylan's "Buckets of Rain" and "Man In The Long Black Coat" too, and I suppose I don't know why either. Again, I feel I had no choice in the matter, this is what I wanted to hear, and you don't argue with a man in my position going through what I was going through, whatever that was.

Songs help you get through life, or they help me get through life, and sometimes you hear a great song and believe it was written to reflect your experience. Maybe it was. Maybe it's nothing like your experience. Maybe it has lyrics you ignore as inapplicable and focus on the lines you cannot get out of your head for reasons you cannot entirely put into words. My Dad is gone, and this was difficult, and the music remains, some that comforts me, some that I will have to keep on my shelf for a while. But a chair is still a chair, even if there's no one sitting there.