I have a habit that's developed over the past two weeks: Since I need to wait at least a half-hour between taking the pill for my mysterious new medical condition and drinking my morning coffee, I fetch my phone--which I try to leave outside the bedroom; I usually sleep better that way--and listen to SPACE 101 in bed for a while. It's a low-power Seattle radio station that my husband helped launch during the year before he died.
Often, I'll hear Tom's voice lingering on in station IDs. Always, I'll hear his music: the thousands of inspired, eclectic tracks he programmed for the times of day when there's no one live on the air. This morning, I heard R.E.M.'s "Driver 8" and "40 Years in the Wilderness" by Bruce Cockburn, "Festina" by Thomas Bartlett and Nico Muhly, "Call the Police" by LCD Soundsystem, and "Blue Juice" by Jimmy McGriff.
The random automation occasionally drops a heart bomb. "This Must be the Place" has been a favorite song of mine for decades, and I remember playing the Talking Heads' track as the highly symbolic first song I listened to in a few new apartments over the years, from small-town Ohio in my 20s to Oakland, California, in my 50s. This summer, when I heard it a few days after Tom died--again, early in the morning on SPACE, knowing he'd programmed it--I knew it had been ruined for me forever, if ruining a song means that tears will start flowing whenever I hear it from now on, and that those tears will be sad and welcome at the same time.
I gave it a good go this morning. Maybe I'll try to sing along, I thought. I sat up, got out of bed, choked out a few phrases as I pulled the shades open and poured my coffee. I made it most of the way, but I had dissolved into tears by the time David Byrne sang "Did I find you or you find me?"
In his excellent book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller describes the intersection of joy and grief, which William Blake summed up as "the deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy." "On my visit to Africa, I remarked to one woman that she had a lot of joy," Weller writes. "Her response stunned me: 'That's because I cry a lot.'" She wasn't happy because she worked a lot or shopped a lot or watched a lot of TV, but because she cried a lot.
I am crying a lot. Some days go by with no tears, but it's better when I cry. I am hopeful that however and whenever and wherever the tears come, they will wash away whatever silt has built up in my bloodstream and organs and pores over the past few months--that music can heal me, cover up the blank spots, and eventually let me find the next place I'm meant to be.
Listen to SPACE 101fm
