The Healing Power of Music...

It has been a rough week.  Watching someone die, slowly, painfully is as hard to bear as it is to participate in and with.  It has been a very long week and I am tired on a level I have not experienced ever before.  My life is consumed by my father’s dying and I am not complaining, it is just the hardest task I have been given in this life.  I am exhausted but find sleep is hard to come by...

Yesterday as my mom and I sat bedside to him, it was quiet.  And he was resting comfortably.  Each day he becomes harder and harder to reach as he transitions to whatever it is that comes next for us when we leave this mortal coil.    I had this idea that perhaps, maybe, he might enjoy some music...

First the backstory:

When I was little my parents spent a lot of time entertaining and partying.  They had friends over, mostly to eat and drink, but they also played music all the time.  We would have family time also where my mom would play her guitar and we would sing folk songs.  Sometimes we would record these sessions and send them to my grandmother.  I wonder what ever happened to those tapes?  That would be a hoot to hear now.  I wonder if my dad would love that?

Anyway, we would sit around, they would drink and smoke and we would sing Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, The Kingston Trio, the Clancy Brothers, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, the Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas and other bands of the day.  My dad also really loved CCR.  My mom would play and we would sing.  And then they would send me to bed, and probably get drunk and screw or whatever...I don’t really want to complete that thought, hard to think of your parents as people like that, still.

Anyway, sometimes other people would join in from the dinner parties and such and but there was always music in my house.  I can remember being like 7 or 8 and a good time was to lie on the living room floor and listen to my parents’ records.  I loved the music almost as much as I loved the comfort and security I felt in my home.  There was a lot of alcohol, but there was also a lot of love.

Somewhere along the way the music kind of stopped.  I am not sure why, but my dad was not really interested in it anymore.  He was not able to bridge the gap between the music he grew up with and the newer stuff.  So he kind of left it behind.  My mom did better, she learned to love all my new wave shit but drew the line at the punk rock.  She just never appreciated the Sex Pistols or Minor Threat.  But she loved and listened to a great deal of the music being produced in the 1980s.  But my dad just thought it was all noise and was constantly telling me to “turn that shit down!”  Of course, me being me, I turned it up every single time...

And then, I am not sure when it happened, but they both stoped listening to  music and lost interest in music.  I did take them to see a concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl...I can’t remember who now, but it was 1980s music for sure.  It is so strange how something can be so important at one time, just gets replaced with other things later on.  I hope I never lose music.  I pray that I never, ever don’t have it playing an important role in my life.  I listen to music every single day.  And I can’t imagine a life without it.

So when the hospice people said that some families play music, I thought, “well he doesn’t like music anymore.”  But then yesterday, in a fit of desperation and sadness, I put on the Clancy Brothers just to see what might happen.  I figured I would get irritation...but I didn’t.  He smiled.  And so I continued to line up artist from his past:  Dylan, PP&M, Beatles, Chad Mitchell Trio and the like.  I created a playlist for him and we just sat with him while he smiled in bed.  When a particularly good number came on, my mom and I would sing it.  It was the best afternoon I have spent in a very long time.

Nothing changed of course.  He is not now granted a reprieve from dying, his transition progresses still. However, for a little while yesterday, the three of us, were taken back to 1975 where we were all young, happy and so very much alive.  It was a good visit...with him, back then and created another foundational memory for me for my life with my dad.

Music heals.  I saw it and felt it yesterday.  Which is really no different than I have experienced the whole of my life.  It was very nice to experience with my parents yesterday. And to have access to another language of the heart.

Again, still...