Finale music
I sat in the house without contacts so that I might not see the world around me. It felt cold outside, and I shivered in my own clothes, inside, wrapping myself within a long-sleeved sweater that accommodated my hefty frame like a warm one-person tent. The shelter was unnecessary, to an observer. In fact, when I finally peered out it was a glorious day, and I scuttled back inside so that I might hide from the opalescence of the full sky shimmering around the sun.
This was not the day for glorious exhilarated thoughts on the creation and the infinite variety of vegetative experiences going on around me. On this wonderful fall day, I thought, I wanted the dank of a London November, dripping off the excess of last night’s continuous fog and the storm, which followed. I finished a book that I had begun only the day before, a little book that stroked my need to cry. And cry I did. When finally, when I could not arrive at a more comfortless place, I began the silent prayer to the unknown to keep me from sliding out of existence. Was I here; was I already a shadow person? It felt so.
Reading Martin Buber in the afternoon made my intellect crawl slowly forward, and begin the thought of being and its meaning. When I had reduced myself to the smallest existence I could endure, and my flame was low, I said to myself, and to Martin. “Thou” indeed, oh you of the soulful brown German rabbinic eyes and long straight nose looking out at me from my old paperback relic. Being what, exactly? A failed human, a totally self absorbed ego-centered state. How disgusting. He just stared at me, but it was a penetrating stare of knowing. I used up everything that was around me, all of everything, and it had only brought me to my knees holding my stomach in pain. I was unwilling to meet “Thou” with an open heart.
How many weeks had I been like this, gradually or not so gradually reaching atrophy of mind and spirit and soul? Worse, I couldn’t think of anything to do about it. Sleepwalking seemed more vivid than this. I wondered if I was depressed. Really depressed, not what those lazy ass-can’t-check-you-out-to-find-out-anything-real doctors would call depression; those Here’s- a-nice-little-pill-to-get-you-more-manageable-and-pique-your-serotonin level-honey-type doctors.
I mean jazz playing, she done me wrong, life is over, blues. And only the kind that go on for a while, which if, not treated, turn one into a drug addict or an alcoholic or perhaps as bad-a neurotic whiner, and pitiful self-absorbed loser contemplating the end of life.
By late afternoon, I languished, a weighted tiredness; a heavy bone’s armory. Among the thoughts idling through the mist, was the thought that, if I should die, there would be no one to tell my family what music to play, and they would get it all wrong.
I ‘ve had a nagging worry for some time, that if I didn’t get together a play list, I could die and they would screw up my final scene. As everyone knows, music sets the tone. But—What was my tone? What said it all for me as exiting rhythms go? What could possibly say a life, sing a life, or holding the note, sound out a journey? And should it go forwards, or retro!
Reluctantly, I began to note the music of love — whose love, I thought — well, frankly, mine. It’s my death I am lyricizing after all. I began with Leonard Cohen, and when I had worked through his music I still felt a slight pink pulse and so I chose his overworked “Hallelujah,” as a soft sort of defiance in the face of death, although I could really hear it being sung by K.D.Lang; Oxymoronic, “Perhaps Love,” John Denver’s sweet ditty came to mind, those words that sing of the possibilities of loving. Humming that tune, I moved on from there to a personal favorite that speaks of life as a Dance. The late Ric Masten knew how to dance, and how to bend with the wind, and he said it well, so he went on the list as well. ‘Let it Be a Dance we do. May I have this dance with you?’
If death is a victory, I reminded myself, then I want it belted out by Pavorotti, the best, the one and only, and so I chose between two of the favorites. How about “Nessum Dorma”, so that he of the many passions could speak for my heart? Or Queen. Vincera!
But for good byes I had another chorus of farewells to consider and admire.
Ray Charles would sing about ‘Georgia’ being on his mind, and I could and did weep with that sentiment.
Billie Holiday with a soft sighing of ‘I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places….’
Sarah Brightman and Andreas Bochelli in “Time to Say goodbye,” in Italian.
Somewhere in this murky gloom, the light lit, and began a tentative renaissance, quite before my heart was ready. No! I spoke to myself, I do not want to return to life, not yet. Even so, despite my own maudlin negativity, I had sung myself back into life.
“I am not ready—NO!”
Despite myself, the lights had become a bit brighter. I was brought back, clinging to my own story, which, even playing as a nightmare, always stars myself. I am indeed the dramatic performer in this little scene. LA Boehme, playing it for the final curtain, amid the tears! Oh – I just could weep for the sadness of it all, if I weren’t so aware of the dramatic focus, light above myself, slightly hot, and a bit narrow. Oh, Queen Judith, you are so full of crap.
I have indeed been a lover of songs, a believer of stories—yours as well as mine. Thank you for your outrageous humor, the myths, your hopes and heart-held fancies. They interweave with my own until I cannot tell where the threads of one story begin and the threads of another leave off. In this way I am connected, I am woven into a vibrational tapestry much larger, and much brighter than my own. Together we create the picture. Together we write the story of our common humanity.
The phone rang, and one more time, my body has seduced me back into a place my mind would not enter willingly. Without my entire consent, I pick it up and answer. Today belongs to living.