Reflections on Death and Music
On a chilly Fall night in November I attended KEXP’s Death & Music at Town Hall Seattle. I went into it cold in every sense of the word. Mimi, a good friend of mine, bought tickets for the two of us as a gift and I had no context for what I might be experiencing that evening. Mimi and I had spent many hours having honest and frank conversations about death tinged with the understanding that this was not a subject that many of our friends (in our 20s and 30s) would entertain with us… at least not openly. Mimi knew that since I’d attended deaths and provided hospice music therapy services I would meet her readily on this topic. I was almost glad to talk about it. Death is something I have strong feelings about and when people ignore it (as if that will make them immune) it makes me feel simultaneously furious, sad, and helpless. So when Mimi bought us tickets to something called Death & Music my genuine response was, “Ooh! That sounds really really cool!”
I guess I thought it would be like a lecture, or like one of the dozens of conference presentations I’d attended that discussed grief, music therapy, hospice work, and of course with a slightly removed, scientific tone to it. But instead, what I found was a night of speakers baring their pain, sharing their stories, and their songs about all of it. The audience hung on every word, cried openly, and laughed when universal truths were shared with jarring candor. I’d never experienced anything like this outside of my circle of death worker friends and colleagues. Each musician shared heartfelt lyrics about complicated relationships, losses, and trials. Each speaker was more sincere and raw than the last. It was a string of stories about walking through grief, and losing parents, partners, friends, and children.
Without getting into their personal details and exploiting their pain for website clicks for the morbidly curious on the internet, overall their messages were, in a word: human. Grief is messy, and weird, and winding, and unpredictable. As one speaker put it, “It’s extraordinary, and ordinary.” And they all walked this journey with music. Performers belted high notes that felt like screaming cries, they found reconnection in shared experiences, and they built soundtracks to their pain. Regardless of the roads we walk in our lives and what life experiences shape us, we all connect to ourselves and to each other with music. Death is the same. We’re all living this life for a short time with the same ending. But death is too hard to look at, too taboo to speak, too sacred to share for so many. Not music. Music is a place where we can feel the entire spectrum of human emotions and share it with others in a sense of safety. If I can’t tell you how I’m feeling, I can share a song that does… Music helps us to avoid the wash of vulnerability, of feeling exposed, of that lightheaded, hot cheek feeling of having your pain laid bare.
I’m glad music allows us a safer way to access the healing of connection, but I’d always wished for a broader community that wouldn’t run from speaking about the reality of dying. I longed for a place where we all acknowledged this truth that, for me, feels uneasy to ignore. When we, as a people, pretend this is not inevitable then when it comes closer to us we run away. I’ve seen it time and again, a loving and devoted mother spends her final days alone because her adult children would rather bicker amongst themselves than face their goodbyes head on. A loving spouse takes their last breath with staff instead of their partner because people are too scared of their own humanity that they can’t be there for someone who’s always been there for them. To me, one of the most loving acts is to put your own baggage on the backburner so you can reverently be with someone in their dying moments. To show them, “I love you so much, that I will love you through this most painful letting go. I won’t turn away. I won’t leave you to do this alone.”
Have I ever told you about rhythmic entrainment? It’s important, I promise. It’s the principle that when there is a beat, we synchronize to it. When we’re in the grocery store, we walk to the tempo of the background music we’re barely consciously perceiving. It starts in utero as a way for us to regulate our heart rate and we keep it until the last moments of life. That’s why music is such a powerful tool in the NICU as it is in hospice. In music therapy, we can literally manipulate the heart beat of another human being. More importantly, we can get all the heart beats in the room beating in time together. We’re connected so deeply when we are connected in music.
Town Hall Seattle on that night was reverberating with truth and vulnerability in a way that is almost never seen in public. It was rare and holy. And needed. People in the audience wept, held each other, some even had notebooks to jot down things that resonated for them. It was this place I’d always longed for where our society doesn’t pretend that death doesn’t exist or that grief is private. We all looked our mortality dead on, we wrestled with the mortality of our loved ones, and wore our pain openly on our faces. And when the music played we all cried, breathed, and felt together. Our hearts beat together.