One of my best and oldest friends sat across from me in our favorite booth next to the pot-bellied stove where we have been meeting for years on Sunday evenings to share tea and dessert and catch up on her life as a wife and mom, mine as a divorcee and employee, and our shared desire to make sense of it all. That night, she was searching to understand why she seemed to feel no sadness over her father’s recent death after years of battling cancer. I was sharing with her my experience of grief, how it is different every time I lose something dear, and how I must surrender to its mysterious timeline and agenda. She had the vacant look she often takes on when she is trying to hear me, but her heart is drifting elsewhere.
Then I realized that one reason why art is so important for grief is that it mirrors a process that is illogical, difficult to explain, and yet full of powerful feeling that must often be released long before it is understood. With my fascination with language and expression, it is the wordless forms of art that I turn to for comfort when my experience and the world around me defy explanation. As these ideas tumbled out, I watched her heart come back to us and her eyes brimmed. She then told me how her sister used to accompany her on flute while she played the harp when they were young, and how a few days before her father’s death, he had heard them practicing an old song to perform for him, and had made the long journey to the neighbor’s house to hear them in person. Seeing him moved by gratitude and filled with peace over her gift was the most significant way she said goodbye. As we spoke, I noticed I had folded my hands on my chest so that the thumbs touched my heart and the forefingers rested on my throat – a mudra born in my subconscious when translating a visceral truth into words.
I recall vividly the moment the counselor who worked with me when I was newly married retrieved me from my deepest sphere of darkness. She handed me an article about the emotional needs of gifted adults called “Can You Hear the Flowers Sing?” Simply reading the title released from me a surge of sadness and relief that had been festering in grief beneath my awareness in a part that had been starved and ignored, and held the very best of me. In that moment, I realized that everything sings to me in depths of feeling and layers of truth. Sometimes those songs come to me as melodies in the dream world that melt away when I awake. Sometimes they come as stanzas of poetry that paint a picture of something universal that sets my skin prickling and heart rolling. That music is the only thing that feels real to me – my only true grief comes when I cannot hear it, and my most treasured friends are those who sing it to me when I forget.
As a child, I was often singing to myself, easily picking up tunes I heard on the radio, in church, and from my family’s music collection. I was still very young when I recognized in Albinoni’s Adagio my own theme song of melancholy hope, and first experienced music’s mysterious ability to stir emotion. Much of my worldview was shaped by Natalie Merchant’s soulful words as I memorized entire albums by visualizing the lyrics twisted into mosaic patterns unique to each song. I established a relationship with my older, wiser self through belting out “Memory” from Cats in our wonderfully echoing bathroom. And one of my greatest joys was learning songs my sister wrote and weaving harmony lines to sing with her. Feeling our voices resonate together in my body during hymns at church was my early connection to religion and singing Handel’s Messiah and the melancholy Lentin masses with our phenomenal church choir were the most vividly transcendental moments of my teen years. The only reason I stopped was that I began to question the teachings of the church and could not breathe life into words I did not believe. My father loved to hear me sing and once shared that he assumed I was a happy child because of it. But singing to me always felt like breathing, like speaking my native tongue. Whether I was feeling joy or pain, singing soothed my anxious mind with an intuitive understanding of my place in the world and a sense of simple peace and rightness beyond the rational coarseness of my days.
During my first three years of college, I was deeply immersed in UC Berkeley’s choral culture. Despite my lack of formal training and innate resistance to music theory, I was able to perform with technically gifted musicians because I learned quickly by rote, had a good ear for blending, and developed a broad vocal range. Just about every one of my friends came from the music program, and my happiest memories from those years were singing casually with them – walking together through campus and spontaneously bursting into song, inventing silly new lyrics, or climbing up into the attic during a house party to experiment with the vibratory thrill of dissonant harmonies. While studying abroad, I found a community choir in Siena, Italy and formed my deepest relationships there among other foreigners drawn to music and while singing “Nessun Dorma” in Italian with people whose culture had birthed it. I began to realize that singing was the only way I seemed to feel comfortable being myself around others, and that I felt more anxious and lost when I did not have a community to sing with. I doubted that I could truly feel alive without that experience of truth, vitality, and comfort.
When my mother died suddenly at the beginning of my senior year of college, I lost my voice. I went to rehearsals and was even accepted into an elite madrigal group, but I had to drop out. I felt strangled, dry, and empty. The years that followed as I traveled and searched in silence for my place in the world were my darkest. I still listened to music and I joined drum circles, but I felt buried. Tunes still came to me, but while living with others I was embarrassed to disturb them with my voice, so the notes came out muted, gasping for air. The only period in which I recognized my old voice and felt soothed by its song was when members of the meditation school I studied with came together for kirtan. A small group of us began to weave intricate harmony lines fading in and out of call and response, organically rising and falling in a shared journey of devotion. One evening, the lead instructor heard us and was overcome with emotion, vowing to record us, but soon after, conflict created rifts in the school and our group disbanded.
After leaving my marriage, I began searching for ways to nurture myself, but all of the choirs I found were either too rudimentary or too professional for me. Earlier this summer, I found BluePrint Ensemble Arts and Theater Initiative on meet-up and was drawn to their small, diverse, non-auditioned ensembles. On the third night of rehearsal, I felt everyone’s voice enter my body to vibrate with mine during a ballad of gorgeous chords, and felt like I had come home for the first time in fifteen years. Now I practice at home, my apartment windows open to the street without a care for who hears me in full bloom. Pulling out the sheet music and rehearsing my lines is the best remedy I have found for the loneliness and anxiety of being single, unemployed, and waiting for my new purpose and structure to take form. And when my mind begins wandering to places that harbor my addictive tendencies, I can call it home with strands of tune I carry like protective mantras.
My giftedness has so often left me feeling alone and misunderstood, longing after a world I can feel but cannot seem to bring into being. But my gifts have also left me with all the tools I need to survive and even, with the right people and in the right place, to thrive. Life always has a shine to it when I sing and challenges that seemed insurmountable feel manageable. It is as though the music organizes the chaos in my mind, and focuses the mass of sensation in my belly so that each emotion can be heard in turn and released. And when the river of my tune joins that choral ocean of sound, delicious harmonies shifting from dissonance to open fifths as I release myself through the warm rush from my throat, I find the relief of being grounded in my own voice while belonging to an experience of universal sentiment. May our song be the sparks we throw in this time of darkness, and may the light in our voices ignite the world with the truth in our hearts.
Nancy
Song of Night by Laura Farnell, based on the poem by Hildegarde Hawthorne
Sing to me a gentle song of night before the moon has reached its lofty height.
Sing to me a song of star’s delight, released to shine above free from the day so bright.
Sing to me a sweet, low melody that drifts in darkened breeze invisibly.
Sing to me a song of shadowed trees that bids my heart rejoice at all its mysteries.
And when this song has reached its end, bend your head to me.
Whisper the words that were born far above, ere the moon had swayed the sea,
Ere the brightest star did shine: oldest of words, even older than time,
And this heart of mine will stop to hear your song.