Music & Grief

Grief for me is the rejection and deliberate absence of music in my life. In particular, that active listening muscle that was ever present before Mum & Dad died, no matter what the tune, is void.

I’m reminded of this because just now I’m listening to Francis Poulenc and the notes seem pulled into me from a completely different life. Shortly Ronald will arrive home and I can bet very good money that he’s going to ask me to turn the music down and I am going to listlessly comply. Another version of me would put up a vociferous argument for him to plug his own ears while I get my fix.

Mostly this rejection is logical. To my thinking it’s a cost that’s paid after losing people you’ve loved. It’s a cost that is extracting a proper form of loss, not some rudimentary penance. There was always going to be a rearrangement of this existence in a profound way and losing the joy of music is where it’s landed for me. Will this particular ennui last forever? Dunno but it’s been going on for some time now.

This rejection is both humdrum and puzzling. I rarely attempt to chivvy myself out of this state of mind but I’m also weirded out that I don’t make an effort to beat this thing. But if I hear Diana Krall, a Handel aria, the opening bars of Beethoven’s Emperor concerto, I will not stand for it. I have to physically do something to ensure my auditory senses are not activated in any emotional sense. I simply do not want those sounds to put me back into those years either during my parents’ illnesses or the years and years prior when these pieces were the background of our collective lives.

Don’t get me started on the Bach Cello Suites. One of them was played at Julia’s funeral and to this day I could not tell you which one it was and I will not listen to them to find out.

Oh I ‘listen’ to music - it’s on in the background, I’ll play a piece of music no problem on the piano but it’s so different from the every day infusion it had for me back in the day. I’ll happily watch instagram videos of dancing couples and marvel at the ease of their movements that match the notes to perfection but they are so truncated with the next reel already on the screen before a proper emotion can be engaged that it doesn’t register in a meaningful way.

The other day I ‘made’ myself listen to the Cello Suites while I was walking to Watson’s Bay but the emotion that swamped me felt manufactured. I’d teed up the piece, already bracing myself that even as the snot and tears flowed, it was a performance of a kind.

Mills & Boon. As if!

What would Julia make of all this? She moved so far away from me in the months before she died that it was impossible to get to the ‘her’ of her. I return always to this distance that was there from the moment of her diagnosis. It was so much more serious than any of us had imagined that I remain fixed in that time and space. My peanut brain just won’t move on from that day she was swinging casually on a chair in Dad’s room at the Links, telling me that she wasn’t going in for the kidney operation after all. That there was something else going on that the doctors were still trying to figure out.

When I would fly home to visit Mum and Dad, I’d also visit Julia. Those visits were excruciating. It’s the only word I have for it. There was one time when we both went to one of her appointments in Randwick. Julia was being picky about every little thing; the car parking, the interactions with the people at reception, the results that she was picking up. I stood at her side unable to fathom anything and feeling two things; an impatience with her and a chasm between us that would never be bridged.

Sometimes when I think about Julia and start writing down the memories, I have the urge to spill it out in one sitting, to get all the jumble of thoughts and emotions and that confusing stickiness of her absence out of me. If I somehow ‘nail the landing’ I can put her death at a remove. Never going to happen. NEVER.

And so the music is the present and the future of all the things past. It’s the the thread that binds me to her, to my parents. This rejection of music is that ongoing raw and frayed anger, love, frustration, and all the other pieces of the fucked-up-ness of it all that I can’t get to grips with.

And on it goes.