The Sunday after Thanksgiving, my father called to tell me that Mom would die that week, perhaps even that night. For three and a half years, she had endured the brutalities of late-stage ovarian cancer and its accompanying treatments. Now, as 2017 staggered to its bedraggled end, she was weary, and her body was reluctantly resigned. With no better alternatives, Mom entered into home hospice care. She would, my family hoped, finally be delivered from nagging pain, bone-deep exhaustion, and every other trick cancer had yanked from its cloak. Of course, we knew the means to this end was absence (hers) and loss (ours).
My sisters and I hurried home to Virginia Beach. As I approached the hospital bed, that ill-fitting puzzle piece wedged in the living room, I was stricken with aggravation—not at my mother, but at Death Cab for Cutie. Long dormant and filed away in my head, their discography had dusted itself off, located “What Sarah Said” (off 2005’s Plans), and pressed play.
“Love is watching someone die,” sang Ben Gibbard, his most dignified warble echoing in my memory.
The lyrics were too on the nose for my taste and, for that very reason, thoroughly obnoxious to me. I’ve retained, as a relic from a self-serious adolescence, an aversion to tidy metaphors and lyrics that take a kindergarten approach to emotional expression. Whatever the context or whim—a breakup, my wedding, walking home in the dark, songs my cat might enjoy—neurotically compiling CD mixes and now Spotify playlists has enabled me to simultaneously express and influence my state of mind. It has also served as a powerful agent of identity-building. In high school, college, and even my early twenties, I rarely felt so empowered as when I believed I could influence someone’s opinion of me with an especially sophisticated mix. Now, as I peer across the endless gulf of my own grief, those previous attempts at soundtracking affections, yearnings, and so-called calamities register as luxuries, one and all. A shattered heart and an addled brain change the way we compose our lives and, by extension, our playlists.
I say all this in order to explain why my mother’s death fundamentally changed the way I think about soundtracks. Sometimes they assemble themselves. After all, songs choose us nearly as often as we choose them, slipping inside our ears and, like quivering seedlings, spreading their roots from our brains to our hearts to our guts. Why should I expect my mind, reeling from tragedy, to still be a meticulous curator? As I watched my mother drift away, I could not wrangle the racket in my brain any more than I could save her from cancer. Helpless and bereft, I handed myself over to the heavy-handed melancholy of “What Sarah Said” and listened to the song repeatedly in the weeks following Mom’s death. The piano’s melody looped and dipped in the vacant space of my living room, as I lay prone on the couch, wrapping between my fingers the snug, aquamarine beanie Mom had worn after losing her hair.
Like anyone else, I am accustomed to musical sieges—the persistence of an especially tenacious earworm, or an instant fixation with a recently acquired album. But in the days immediately after my mother’s passing, my brain was a forced attendee at a concert seemingly calibrated to ensure my emotional ruin. I rarely listened to music, but seemed to always hear it. “What Sarah Said,” yes—and too much—but also Judy Collins’ “Send in the Clowns,” as well as her cover of “Both Sides Now” (Mom preferred it to Joni Mitchell’s original). “It’s Quiet Uptown,” from Hamilton, chronicles the particular devastation of losing a child, but our affinities are not always guided by precision. After Mom’s body left our house for the crematory, I lay on my back in the dark; eventually Lin-Manuel Miranda answered the ache in my throat with his own trembling call: “You knock me out, I fall apart.” “Can you imagine?” the chorus responds. I couldn’t—it was a nightmare I was loath to own—but there I was, shivering in its midst.
Despite the internal clamor, the thought of owning it and making what I morbidly decided to call a “Dead Mom Soundtrack” didn’t exactly appeal to me. Besides, my energies were devoted to composing an obituary and remarks for the memorial service. But to even think about my mother was to free-fall amid sonic artifacts: her laugh, our banter, and so much music. Our shared history returned to me, imbued in melodies I would never lose, because safeguarding her memory depended on keeping them close.
Neither Mom nor I have ever been musical people, strictly speaking, but that detail strikes me as irrelevant. We both enveloped ourselves in it separately, but I revelled in the rare intersections. When, in middle school, the chorus of Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” floated from the kitchen to my bedroom, I realized that Mom had overheard me listening to my radio rip of the song (repeated ad infinitum) and adopted it as her own. Thanks to this discovery, and with some trial and error, I gradually discerned my mother’s taste and mapped our common ground. She had bequeathed to me her romantic heart; feeling and beauty were joined for us like the two faces of Janus. We relished music that was unrepentantly maximalist, that swelled with earnest abandon. It’s no great surprise that after I discovered Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations, we basked in Patrick Doyle’s luxuriant, dreamy score—and, having deemed it a car ride staple, subjected every captive passenger to “Kissing in the Rain.”
Like most Boomer households, it was accepted that the elder generation would (for the most part) adhere to its own cultural milieu; my sisters and I were welcome to adopt it as we pleased. As such, reverence for 1970s “Saturday Night Live” was something of a given, as was our familial appreciation for the Blues Brothers, the surprisingly legit duo of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Mom and I would giggle over “Rubber Biscuit,” the doo-wop song covered absurdly and addictively on the Brothers’ Briefcase Full Of Blues. “Bow bow bow,” Mom would imitate, channeling her finest Aykroyd. And I would cackle, warm with joyful confidence in our bond—a condition enjoyed by those who subscribe to the faulty logic that just because you need someone, they will always exist.
By virtue of its length, the soundtrack to a 32-year relationship will include a few songs that, in the wake of loss, feel too dangerous to revisit. My mother was a staunch devotee of the Monkees, and since her death I’ve taken great pains to avoid Davy Jones’ voice. When I was 14 and committed to quaint eccentricity, I announced that I wanted to adopt a pet goat and name him Walter. Soon after, Mom introduced me to the Kinks’ “Do You Remember Walter?”, which we listened to endlessly while developing a personality for our own imagined pet. Now I can neither think about goats nor listen to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. And it might seem mildly deranged to choke up at the falsetto in James’ “Laid,” a song that specifies the sexual position necessary for the singer’s lover to orgasm, but Mom delighted in the song. If we were feeling a bit devilish, we would play it in the car while running errands (without Dad).
Though the music that reminds me of Mom now sounds bittersweet, the memories it summons reassure me that she is no phantasm; for 62 years, she lived. As I gradually replay our songs, I begin spooning timid amounts of hope into the theory that no one is ever fully lost. There’s little comfort to be found in untimely death, and those of us who stagger in its aftermath are forced to clutch at what we can. I grasp at my mother’s traces—old voicemails, her tank tops, her slender scrawl in the family phone book—and seek barbed satisfaction in the evidence that to die is not to be undone. My mother is no longer here, but she always will have been. Perhaps I’m still searching for her—everywhere, in everything—because I believe that somehow I will find her. I can’t provide evidence to support this notion; I can only offer a tenuous theory, born from a song.
When I was 14, Mom and I took a car trip from our home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where we had previously lived (and to which we would soon return). I was ensconced in a still-blossoming love of Tori Amos, and Mom, curious, suggested that I slip Little Earthquakes into the car’s CD player. She listened patiently. Then, “Tear in Your Hand” announced itself, with a staccato piano melody that prances and lingers like a heart resisting the pull of sorrow.
“Oh, I really like this,” she remarked, even before Tori had begun to sing.
There are songs that reference a daughter’s relationship with her parents on Little Earthquakes: “Mother,” unsurprisingly, is one; “Tear in Your Hand” is not. Still, Amos’ achingly reluctant farewell to someone she loves sits right with me here: resonant and, blessedly, less on the nose than Death Cab for Cutie. I cling to one line in particular—“Caught a ride with the moon”—despite never having quite deciphered it. I’ve decided it belongs to Mom, and that she’s traveling at a velocity beyond my fathoming, but not beyond the speed of sound. So I’ll keep listening, because I know that she is too.
