11/4/21
Music has held my life together.....in several ways, but at the moment i'm thinking in particular of how it has preserved moments in time for me: Bee Gees takes me back to Christmas day 1981, Supertramp's "Cannonball" puts me back in that summer when we were getting a deck built and Barry Manilow's "Looks like we made it" takes me back to walking around the winter wonderland at Stein's garden center. There are countless moments such as these for, some huge, some ordinary, that are captured in songs and artists.
When my mom's aphasia took her ability to speak clearly and understand much of what was being said to her, it also took her ability to appreciate music. Music was a gift she gave me and we shared that until the aphasia. And then I discovered she responded with great joy to the physicality of musicians be it Mick Jagger strutting around, Pete Townshend windmills, David Byrne's dance style or Stevie Ray Vaughn's passion. That was a blessing to us both.
This past March I picked up the Black Pumas music and I was really soaking it up, it was a sound I would have shared with her years ago as well. They were also appearing on the Grammys on March 14th, which was also her bday, so I put the show on for her and the singer was more animated on stage then I expected ,she was very excited by them. It would be the last new music I would share with her as she went into the hospital about three weeks later and died two weeks after that. But this performance holds yet another moment in time that never has to fully belong to the past. A moment that I can just enter and enjoy without so much turmoil surrounding it now as it did then.
Comments