Monday, September 18, 2006

• Every Song Has a Story

  Currently Listening Don't Look Back By Boston Don't Look Back see related

  Internet Island 18.01

  I've been putting off both this Internet Island topic and talk about my trip to Colorado and my grandfather's death and funeral stuff.  Humming some distinctly somber Jewish songs for days now, I realized this morning that maybe it would be best, and easiest, to blend the two topics, at least for starters. 

  There are so many Songs of my Life.  Every song with which I am intimately familiar has a story or at least a feeling attached to it.  I could write an encyclopedia on this subject, chronicling the songs of my life.

  But there's a handful of songs, at least, particular to that week in time, a Thursday through the following Saturday.  We'll start with Metallica.

  Metallica's Symphony and Metal album is the album that got me into the band.  They blend their sound with that of a symphony orchestra, playing old favorites and adding a few new songs that sound great when arranged with classical instruments.  On the evening of Thursday, August 31st, my sister, dad, and I started driving out from Ohio to Colorado.  While in the car, we played 20 Questions, talked about everything, and listened to some music.  I stationed myself in the back of my mom's giant boat of a car and tried to sleep.  I got a good half hour's nap, I think, when we stopped for gas in St. Louis, Missouri.  At 11:30 eastern time, I began my clip of the drive, and I was the Master, Master, of the music.  Metallica is great driving music, and S&M was a good choice for driving music when there were other people in the car.  It kept me alert and interested, and it drove me to drive faster.  One of the original songs on this album, No Leaf Clover, is one of my husband's and my official songs.  Only now, reading some of the lyrics here, do I realize how perfect the song was to the situation at the time. 
  "Pay no mind to the distant thunder
  Beauty fills his head with wonder."
  And I paid little heed to the tough times with my grandfather ahead.  I enjoyed the hypnosis and the sheer beauty of the road.  I've spent a good portion of my life on the road - whether moving every few years, visiting friends and family while in college, or endless hours in the RV with the 'rents, siblings, and pets.  It's a place I call home as much as anywhere... and then some other lyrics...
  "Good day to be alive Sir
  Good day to be alive, he said..."

  We arrived in Colorado Springs somewhere around noon, mountain time.  We saw my grandmother and mother and then went to the hospital to visit Grandpa.  He was talking a little bit at first, mostly complaining about the machine they used to suck mucus out of his mouth and the "treatment" of steam over his nose and mouth to help relieve some of the congestion.  Grandpa looked more frail and weak than we had ever seen him.  He was perhaps weaker than his daughters had seen him, either.  Grandpa was always stalwart, stern, crabby, crass, stubborn.  He was loving underneath it all, as his sparkling eyes, good cooking, and pictures of yore can testify.  It seemed as my sister as I knew him, though, that he had trouble communicating his affection to people.  I think my cousins in Denver were good for him that way; he saw them often, a couple of times a month, and when I took care of my cousins for three months in the summer, I saw more smiles from my grandfather than I'd seen in the entire 19 years prior.  In the hospital, though, Grandpa didn't do a lot of smiling.  He reached out for my sister and me, and Laura did something I don't think anybody else had - she held his hand.  I followed suit.  Later in the afternoon, Grandpa's health declined more and he became more agitated.  It was hard to understand, and we hoped Grandma couldn't decipher the words when he said "I'm dying."  Later, Laura and I heard him plea, "Help me die."  I tried to assure him that we weren't doing anything to prolong his suffering, that the medicine we were giving him was for pain, and that we were just trying to make him more comfortable for the end.  We told him his other daughter would be in to visit tomorrow, that he could let go and say goodbye whenever he needed to, but that she was coming as soon as she could.  She did come the next day, after I spent a lot of time at the hospital with my grandmother.  Grandpa was in and out of consciousness then.  Sixty years of smoking several packs of cigarettes a day and his lungs were shutting down.  Decades of alcoholism weren't helping his kidneys, either.  Grandpa was experiencing hypoxia.  His lungs wouldn't take in enough oxygen, and his system would be overwhelmed with carbon dioxide, and he kept passing out.  We also had him sedated with morphine, because everytime he'd come out of it, he would raise his arms in a kind of protest and delirium.  I held his arm and gently lowered it back to the bed, telling him we were here and it was almost time and he could let go.  Then everybody came in together - my parents, sister.  Grandpa'seldest daughter, who held a lot of bitterness regarding him, finally arrived and said a few words to him to let him know she was there.  He wasn't conscious, but as all the nurses told us in hushed and reverent tones, hearing tends to be the last sense to go, and he was probably waiting for all of his daughters to be there.  Soon Grandpa's pulse dropped about ten beats per minute and he was down to six or seven breaths a minute.  I didn't know what else to do as we all kept vigil, so I counted and kept track of these physical measures as my sister and I held his hand.  We left the hospital at 3:30 and got the call at 10:00.
  "Yeah, then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel
  Is just a freight train coming your way."
  A few minutes before the phone rang, jerking us all awake in a moment of knowing and clarity, I was falling asleep.  I had this mystical sort of vision of a purgatory, a purging, a freight train of memory and understanding and pain.  I had this understanding that I was seeing part of what my grandfather was feeling, reliving some of his sins and his understanding their consequences to other people.  It hurt a lot, and it scared me, until I experienced a stop and a complete peace.  In his final weeks, and at least in the final day and hours of his life, I saw a change in my grandfather.  I knew he was realizing parts of his life, probably talking to God and asking forgiveness.  So when the vision of purgatory ended, I felt nothing but peace.  I had faith that the freight train was over and that the soothing light of God was taking Grandpa home.

  The next days were filled with cleaning and family and travel and fun and friends and food and mourning and hustle and bustle.  It was the holiday weekend, so we couldn't get a lot done that Sunday and Monday.  On Sunday, Grandma and I went to her church after the last mass to see if we could catch the priest to set up a time for the funeral.  We did, and we spoke with the head of the music ministry, who let us borrow a book on funeral stuff and a hymnal.  I hadn't seen the Catholic hymnal in years, and it was comforting to hold it in my hand.  We took it back and my mother assumed the task of putting the readings and music together for the funeral.  "A Mighty Fortress," "Amazing Grace," "How Great Thou Art," and "We Will Rise Again" were the standards we chose, with the Celebration Mass for our Holy Holys and Amens during the liturgies. 
  "We will run and not grow weary,
  for our God will be our strength
  and we fly like the eagle,
  we will rise again."

  On Monday, my dad, aunt, uncle, and grandmother and I went out to try to relax a bit.  It was the holiday and there was nothing productive we could do, so we decided to enjoy the beautiful weather and each other's company.  We drove to the beautiful little tourist town of Manitou Springs, ate lunch, did some window shopping, and had some ice cream.  On the way, we drove through most of downtown Colorado Springs.  There was music from the 70s on the radio - Steely Dan and Zeppelin and great classics of that sort.  I wish I could remember some of the specifics, somehow let you into my mind and memories to give you a feel for the music integral to my father's world and the music I always associate with him.  As we drove past the church where he and my mother were married 25 years ago, he beamed.  He noted aloud how the combination of classic rock music and sightseeing in the town where he spent his college years and his finest courtship were a pleasant and radical trip down memory lane. [He didn't quite use those words, per se, but he was more eloquent than usual.]  Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Bob Seger, Steppenwolf - I feel a bit out of place and time when I realize how dear these songs are to me, and how I wasn't there when they were created.

  Wednesday evening was the visitation.  At the funeral home, they piped in some soft music, some choral and some on the organ.  I think some of it was "Ave Maria."  Grandpa stopped going to church after Vatican II.  He was upset that they changed the tradition of the mass, and he missed the Latin.  We were sure to have a Latin song at his funeral mass.  I've been singing Ave Maria (or as many words of it as I know) for a couple of weeks now.

  Thursday was the mass itself.  In addition to the songs already mentioned, the military honor guard played Taps.  It gets me every time.  I don't often think about the words that go with the melody, but I know that the end of a couple of the verses is "God is nigh."  Somehow, I always remember it as "God is love."

  And now, in the past week, I find myself singing songs in Hebrew.  I'm not Jewish, but I was in a Jewish choir for about three years in college.  The song most in my head has been Ani Ma'Amin.  It is a song many Jews sang on their way to the concentration camps in Europe in the 40s.  "I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah," the beginning translates.  Perhaps later I'll steal my husband's microphone and record an a capella singing of it.  Our choir sang this song at the Holocaust Remembrance service at the VA hospital in Cleveland several years in a row.  World War II veterans came to the service to remember.  My grandfather was too young by a few years to have been in WWII, but he served in Korea and Vietnam several times.  I realize that the sorrow in the song, the hope in the song, and its relation to war are what bring me to sing the song now.

  There's also Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, or Jerusalem of Gold.  You can find the lyrics, both Hebrew and English, and a midi file of the music (which I may also turn into a sound file of my own... although this one requires the surrounding harmonies and I really can't sing all four parts by myself, though I know two of them), here, if you're interested.  It's a beautiful song.

  Here the music of my life ends, for now.  Music is a great vehicle, or crutch, or impetus, to help me tell my stories.  Thanks, Mike, and thanks to all of you if you got this far.

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