Hold On To Yourself: The Soundtrack Of Loss, Memory, and Moments
I’m parked in the half-light of the Dunkin Donuts. A lone employee scurries around under the glow of the fluorescent lights, closing up for the night. I’m just here. Parked outside the martial arts studio waiting for my teen son to finish up, I am playing the time game, will we or will we not we make the next boat home? When you live on an island, minutes can make all the difference.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, legs tucked under me, skirt twisted tight at my knees, pinned tight under the weight of my stacked legs.
The dash glows brighter as the late September light fades and brings the digital clock’s time into focus. 6:53 pm.
It’s been thirty one years and 52 minutes since they called it. These details become less sharp but really never leave.
I glance curiously at the curve of my calves. Browned by the summer sun. Toned and lean in this flattering yet dwindling light but also from a life on the move. But also hidden in the shadows. I am aware of the loosening crepe-paper skin becoming soft and droopy at the knees. The letting go, the passage of time. I’m 5 years younger than he was on this day. I find myself drifting back, caught up in an odd little memory from so long ago:
The nurse on duty tells us we can be in the room to have some time. Freed from the veins of life support, here lies under respectfully dimmed lighting, the simple yet oddly elegant shape of my dead father shrouded under a draped sheet. He was only 55. It’s so surreal we can’t even comprehend. We shouldn’t even be here. Just yesterday he was puttering around on his beloved wooden lobster boat, the Tumblehome. What are we supposed to do with this sliver of time they’ve given us? It’s a measurement of the cruelest calculation. Alone, I run my cupped hand gently along the outside of his lower leg. My fingers barely touching the outline through the cotton sheets. But I know his calves are strong. Sturdy. Islanders never really stop and their bodies take the shape of their scrappy, rugged life of resourcefulness. This islander’s body is the shape of resilience and grit and independence. It is not a body nor soul of a man who has lived out his life under florescent lights, seated in a chair, cradling phones, gripping steering wheels on a paved commute. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear… What lies beneath are sea legs. A call to the ocean early on in his youth to flee a life of privilege and chaos to mess around with boats. Coast Guard search and rescue legs. And later, in another time long ago, maybe around the time he gave up the ocean for engines and greasy carburetors and other mechanical parts, those legs supported my weight, and that of my sister’s, as he carried us across the Cove, over rocks, and up a steep gravelly hill to launch toy airplanes that will catch the wind and glide over the gravestones below.
In the present, 2023, Pink Floyd is on the radio. A rhythmic console red bar rises and falls pulsing in time to my throbbing temple, an intake of air, a rising sharpness at my throat.
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain?
6:01 pm. September 21. 1992. The 265th day of the year 1992. There were 101 days remaining until the end of the year. The day of the week was Monday.
How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year
It’s a lonely harmony. “detached feelings many of us float through life with. It's a commentary on how people cope with the world by withdrawing physically, mentally, or emotionally.”
And in 1992 it’s REM:
Well, everybody hurts sometimes
Everybody cries
Everybody hurts, sometimes
And everybody hurts sometimes
So hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on, hold on
Hold on, hold on, hold on
I included it on a mixtape for my mother that year. I thought it would help. Now it just feels like the dramatic naivete of a lost 19 year old. My mom is now a 44 year old widow. We are worlds apart in our grief.
And in 1993 we’re still raw and reeling. And Sarah McLachlan belts this one out, blunt and sharp.
Hold on
Hold on to yourself
Oh god
If you're out there won't you hear me.
I know we're never talked before
The man I love is leaving
Won't you take him when he comes to your door.
Am I in heaven here or
Am I in hell…
Hold on to yourself
For this is gonna hurt like hell.
I put that one on repeat and shared it with my mother. Because surely she remembers the long night pacing through long shadows cast down from spotlights anchored on the corners of the hospital’s corridors? Because it was here, at one point in the early morning hours, side by side, sitting slumped against the wall, chins resting on knees- an awkward upright fetal position - where we gently changed positions and she became the child and I became the reassuring adult.
2023 …
Weightlessness, no gravity
Were we somewhere in-between?
I'm a ghost of you, you're a ghost of me
A last ditch request to ease up on the reality, I asked the staff on duty if there was a way to tune the machine to “silent mode” so she wouldn’t have to hear the beeps and flateline. Because my only context to this situation is a network hospital drama. I was 19 and it sure didn’t seem real. What else was there to control? Perhaps altering hospital sounds could lessen the trajectory of the grief that was to come. An ex boyfriend called me on the phone. I took his call on the phone in the family waiting room and I told him I. Was. OK. He told me his mother was heartbroken. In a few years she’s be dead, too. Lymphoma.
Is there a soundtrack to grief? A rhythm to our sorrow?
There certainly is and it’s on repeat. Thirty one years and 52 minutes and counting, slumped over in the front seat of my car, waiting for my son he’s never met, the music is medicinal. Music keeps my memories in tune.
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here
The ballads and beats blindside me through the decades. Time passes but the music does not. And I am grateful for the shape of their refrain.
This piece was written for Lipstick Rodeo Magazine’s ‘music’ edition in memory of my father, Robert Treat Boody.
The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost | 1915
Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd | 1975
Everybody Hurts, REM | 1992
Hold On, Sarah McLachlan | 1994
San Luis, Gregory Alan Isakof | 2018
Hold On, Sarah McLachlan | 1994
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