It was just another day, but yet it wasn’t. Three and a half years exactly since my son’s death. A regular day, driving mindlessly on a road trip, listening to the searing, soaring guitars on Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians album Ghost of a Dog. Just me, alone in the car, passing ghost towns of central Florida. ‘Motel Good Food Bar’ proclaimed a worn sign. ‘Beer Whiskey’ boasted another.
Edie played on, and the music pierced my heart. Music I have listened to dozens of times, BEFORE Luke’s crash. I felt like I was hearing it, really getting it, for the first time. References to death ‘I ain’t gonna kill myself’, confusion, pathos… the desperate cries of a young adult. Edie Brickell! Icon Paul Simon’s wife! Edie, whose music I used to teach English to Spanish-speaking kids decades ago. How did I not hear then, the uncertainty, the yearning, in her questions, ‘who will be there for me?’ ‘Mama, will you be there?’ Such honesty and vulnerability in these lines.
The piercing guitar, lilting strings, heartwrenching chords struck me to the core. Edie’s deeply emotional voice: ‘one day you just get tired of dying’. My tears flowed like the whiskey surely had in that broken down, long-shuttered bar. I cried for my son, for who he was and could have been. I cried for his lost future. And I cried for every struggling young person feeling confusion and pain, wondering how to connect. I felt like a veil had been lifted, hearing Edie’s plaintive voice, trying to make sense of a chaotic and at times deeply disappointing world. She sings of pain, suffering, suicide, death. And, yes, of love and life and of sitting on a front porch watching the world.
The answer to MY question, why I was now hearing what I could not hear before deep grief, came to me weeks later. Why? Because I am a different person. Because we are all different after the death of our child. Because things that we used to enjoy may no longer appeal. Familiar music may now seem foreign. A speaker at the first candlelight service I attended explained it this way: Picture a vase, a beautiful vase. Now imagine smashing it on the ground. Although you may pick up every single tiny shard—which of course is not even feasible—although you glue it back exactly as it was, is it the same vase? It may contain all the pieces and colors of the original, yet it is most certainly shattered. Like the vase, bereaved parents—Vilomahs—add a new facet to our identity. Broken. In pieces; shattered. Yes we may paste on a smile and make every effort to socialize, yet inside we are broken.
Everyone grieves differently, but for the first two or three years after losing my son, music was repulsive to me. Especially the music that had any association with him. It felt like being punched in the stomach every time a song came on. My solution was silence. Silence was neutral. Silence was not invasive. This is a tiny part of how loss of a child changes us. How to go forward in our new, shattered identity? My best advice is Listen to that inner voice. Follow your gut. Join a group of bereaved parents, or an online forum. Make your emotional needs number one.
Even those of us who grew up in the Smiley Face generation (‘Have a good day’ a national mandate) can learn that it is OK to honor our feelings, to plainly say ‘I feel broken.’ When asked how we are holding up. As Edie sings in her raw, bending voice, ‘there are thousands of angels beating in my heart’; the pain of having a child snatched away is certainly the most terrible of life’s ironic twists. Talk about it.