Like a ship

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Music is a powerful link to emotion and memory for me. The first few bars of a song can evoke the ineffable feeling of a person, place, or time in my life. Music has always been there, in the background. It’s been a soundtrack to romance’s beginnings and ends, to occasions both momentous and mundane. Lip-syncing to Bonnie Raitt on the record player while I did chores around the house. Bouncing along to Beyonce while I sat in traffic. Dancing with my partner cheek to cheek while Otis Redding sang a serenade. The jazzy riffs of almost any Grateful Dead song deliver me a clear vision of my dad’s old truck bouncing up the driveway in a cloud of dust, a bootleg concert tape blaring at top volume. The memories are sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, but with the touch of a button I can return to them whenever I choose.

When I became pregnant with our first child, music was immediately part of the story. Before she was born, we were playing and singing songs to my pregnant belly in hopes of creating that magical sound-memory link that would persist throughout her life. We spent months carefully curating a birth playlist, each song imbued with meaning, hopes, future plans communicated through song. Each one was a specially chosen message to my baby, my way of expressing my visions of our love. They were mostly joyful songs about the promise of a life about to unfold, as I anticipated seeing the world anew through her eyes. Music was a way to express a feeling that transcended words. 

As labor became an emergency and then a tragedy, that birth playlist was quickly forgotten. With my beloved daughter dead, nothing was right. I spent my days staring at the wall, not speaking, tears running down my face. Music was now a maudlin distortion of emotion: every song either broadcast my despair out loud or grated with a forced cheerfulness. I wanted silence. 

Someone came to our house to sit with us shortly after Olivia died and put on an Otis Redding album to fill the space. All the lyrics seemed to be about someone’s baby who was lost – how had I never noticed that before?

Bring back my baby to me. 
Where did my baby go? 
My sweet baby. 
Oh, baby. 

I got up and left the room. It was all too much, too specific. The pain was already so acute, I didn’t need the soundtrack, too. The birth playlist existed now as a monument to my naivete, to everything I expected but didn’t get, to everything she would never experience. 

Almost without realizing it, I banished music from my life, first because it could easily reduce me to tears or make me angry, but later because I didn’t feel I deserved it. The pleasure and release of it, to feel carefree for a moment, to luxuriate in a feeling. I only wanted to listen to podcasts or maybe news radio. Music was something you listened to when you felt free, open to whatever emotions the song might bring up. Rolling the windows down and feeling the breeze in your hair. I didn’t deserve any of that.

It's been three and a half years now and I’ve spent most of my commutes during that time listening to podcasts about quirky mysteries of science. Magic mushrooms, giant sharks – nothing too emotional. Recently, though, I spent a weekend running errands. Hours alone in the car going back and forth across the city. I found myself opening my music app, putting on an old playlist, rolling down the windows and singing along. Crying at some songs, smiling at others, playing them a second time – even the sad ones. 

That day, I revisited Olivia’s playlist, something that had seemed unthinkable to me for years. The final song I had chosen for the feeling its swelling gospel harmonies evoked – one of joy and promise. But as I listened to the lyrics this time around, they told a different story. 

Just like a ship without a sail
I looked for pleasure, but I found pain
I looked for sunshine, but I found rain
. . .But I know I can take it. . . 

The melodies touch a place of beauty and wonder, but the words communicate disappointment and loneliness. These states all coexist, not paradoxically but necessarily. Soaring together in song, the musicians conjured something bittersweet that I struggle to express in writing. Something true, truer than pleasure alone or pain alone. The hopes I had for my daughter’s life, the devastation at losing her, the commingling of sweet and bitter that are ultimately the expression of my love for her. The decision to continue to live and to allow the music back in. It’s all there if you listen closely.

How does music touch your loss and life? Are there songs that speak to you?