Songs in my Head, Part 2

“It’s wonderful to see you smiling again,” Scott tells me, on the second day of our trip to Hawaii.

Yet at night, I dream of loss. A small child is missing, and I search for them. Someone (else) I love has died. I am back in the family home, and although my ex is physically present, there is the despair of knowing he has already left, emotionally, and the desperation of trying to deny that I know it. I wander a house that I realize on waking was one I lived in as a child. I can hear my mother’s laughter, yet can never find her— she is always, always just one more room away.

Everyone I know
Goes away in the end

The lyrics are from the song currently in my head: Hurt, not the Nine Inch Nails original but the cover of it that Johnny Cash did in the last year of his life. If you haven’t heard it, listen, or better yet, watch the music video, rated by some as one of the best ever produced.

I smile here, in the water and the sunshine, hiking in the mountains, looking at the ocean from our room or a beachside bar or restaurant. There are memories, but they are all happy ones, from three visits here with my son. Sometimes I even forget.

At home, I am constantly reminded that my son is dead. Which is worse, running into someone who hugs me, sometimes wordlessly, hearing condolences from my dentist, my chiropractor? Or running into an acquaintance who doesn’t know, who asks, “So how are the kids?” Which is worse, ignoring the boxes in the garage or the corner, or going through them, deciding what to do with his trombone, his clothes, his textbooks?

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real

It’s fascinating that the same lyrics resonate so strongly with people in their 20s and those in their 70s. Yet perhaps it is not so surprising. The despair of seeing the horror, the unfairness, the cruelty in the world is fresh for the young, but the old have the addition of having seen even more of it, and having lost much hope of it changing. Heartbreak is new and acute to the young, but the old have had much more of it. They have lost loves, parents, spouses, friends, even children. They have seen their accomplishments fade and be forgotten.

Those in the middle years of their lives have their own disappointments and crises, but most have less time to focus on them. They are so damn busy, building a life, a career, a family, accumulating assets and things, just trying to get by. I remember.

Both in youth and age we face the same challenges. Do we give in to despair, to existential dread? Do we try to numb ourselves, with substances or activities that help us ignore reality?

Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

Do we focus on the pain to the point that we cannot be happy? Or do we look, clear-eyed, and understand that pain and joy are both essential parts of life?

Do we wake up every morning and decide that, despite it all or even because of it all, we are glad to be alive? Can we embrace the present moment?

My mother was always a “cup half empty” person. Her early life was full of extreme ups and downs, but the second half of her adulthood was comfortable and even. Yet she held grudges for decades, bitter over events long past, or recent slights. She could be funny and warm at times, and we could “make her happy,” but before long we would disappoint her in some way and the frown would return. It wasn’t until the last month of her life that she let go of the past and her future expectations and started to be appreciative of what she had— so much so that we said, “Who is this woman and what did she do with our mother?”

My children’s other grandmother was very different. In 25 years I only once heard her speak ill of someone. (Unfortunately, I was so shocked that I didn’t ask what had happened at that Hollywood dinner!) Blind and in a wheelchair at the end of her life, she was still making connections and new friends, all of whom were “just lovely.”

It’s not always easy, but it’s a choice.

On our last day in Hawaii I go out on a paddle-board to spread some of Carson’s ashes in front of the hotel we’d stayed in when he was 14. I cry with the sorrow of him being gone, and the joy of the memories.

There is a rainbow. And I am glad to be alive.