In recent weeks, I’ve experienced numerous little moments of intense emotion, where the emotions in question are simultaneously joyful and profoundly, despairingly sad. And I’ve wanted to talk about these experiences with someone, but I don’t really have opportunities to do so—and in any case, I’ve not quite known how. And so, instead, I’ve been thinking of writing about them. Of course, I’ve taken long enough to get around to it that some of what I had to say is no longer quite as fresh, but I guess I’m pushing on regardless. These thoughts are pretty unfocused, and may or may not congeal into any kind of cohesive “point.” And they’re sort of about various things, but—inevitably—they’re mainly about the bottomless well of grief and loss in which I’ve been treading water for the past couple years, since Jen left me. Doubly so, in a way, in fact, since in “the before time,” when I filled up with thoughts and feelings that needed to be spoken, I would just have shared them in real time with Jen, and not been left grasping for a way to do more with them than just sit in them in isolation. One of the catch-22s of divorce: when feelings and reflections are stirred up around things that were so utterly specific to “us” that it would be hard to adequately communicate them to anyone else, I can’t, by the very nature of the situation, talk about them with the one person who would have totally “gotten it.”
Still, I’m not here to attempt to write any sort of big-picture “status update” about where I am in, or how I’m progressing through, the process of grieving or coping or trying to move on. Partly because that feels impossible, too full of contradictions; I’m in so much better a place than I was a year ago, for example, but sometimes I feel hopeless, and everything is cyclical, and three or four different things are true at once. And, blah, blah; try to put words to it, and it comes out sounding meaningless. But also partly (mostly, even) because that just isn’t what inspired me to sit down and write. A bunch of specific experiences & feelings in recent weeks, loosely tied together by some common threads, did that. Briefly, this is mostly about moments when reminders of quirky (or maybe “dorky” would be a better word) little things that Jen and I shared have produced bursts of joy and nostalgia that then suddenly morph into grief and loneliness. It’s weird; from the start, I’ve found that I tend to access that deep well of grief mostly in these little, often unexpected, but overwhelming, crushing bursts—as though, were I to feel it all it once, I would drown in it, so instead my psyche has been doling it out to me piecemeal, over a period of months and years. Often, and maybe not surprisingly, these sorts of bursts have (in the past) been triggered by stuff relating to tortoises. Other times, it’s been memories of vacations together, or just little details about daily life. But the motif connecting most of the moments that I’ve been having lately, and that I sat down to write about tonight, has been music.
So, a starting point: At the beginning of November, my community band (which, of course, used to be our community band) started working on the music that we’ll be playing for our Christmas concert this year. One of the pieces we’re playing is called “Fantasia on a Christmas Carol” (Erik Morales). It’s basically a series of takes on “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” with a couple bits of other well-known pieces of (non-Christmas) music cleverly worked in—the main one being Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” Now, some years ago (6? 8? 10?), we played “Sheep May Safely Graze” itself in band, which is how I came to be familiar with it. Jen and I had enjoyed practicing it together. So when, the first time sight-reading through “Fantasia on a Christmas Carol” in band, I suddenly found myself playing the “Sheep May Safely Graze” melody, I recognized it right away, and it triggered a flood of memories and emotions. Jen and me (being us) renaming the piece “Torts May Safely Graze,” for one thing. How it made us happy to keep a home in which this version of the title was a fact. But, even more than that, it made me think of hours spent sitting together on the couch, playing the computer game Civilization IV. A weird connection, for sure. But during the early, “exploring the territory around you” phase of the game, which didn’t involve much actual in-game interaction, it was mainly the customary exchange of dorky banter and private jokes that made the experience a shared one. One of them was this: In the game, as you explore territory, you find spots that have various resources that you can “harvest” in various ways. One of them is (you guessed it) sheep. And whenever one of us would discover a sheep resource, we would inevitably start singing “Sheep May Safely Graze”: “bop-bada-bop bada ba, da, da, da; bop-bada-bop bada ba, da, da, da…” Just a silly, inconsequential little ritual, or shorthand…and one of the ways that we connected while playing the game. Stupid, mundane, quirky, highly specific stuff like this is what intimacy is made of—and each time I’m reminded of another little instance or example of it that I perhaps hadn’t thought about yet since The End, it makes what I’ve lost seem both fresh and sort of limitless, at least in that moment. Stumbling unexpectedly upon “Sheep May Safely Graze” in the middle of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in band that night plunged me into a sudden, vivid experience of the joy of the related memories, and the intimacy, carried by this inimitable little piece of who we were together—and, in the same instant, made me acutely conscious of the past tense in what I just said (“who we were together”), and prompted another in a seemingly endless series of small mental readjustments, and focused me on the painful reality that, for reasons I will likely never fully understand, Jen unfathomably chose to throw all of this away.
This was by no means the first time that band music and band experiences have triggered moments like this for me, even if it was an especially intense instance (maybe mostly because of how unexpected it was; I didn’t know that “Sheep” was going to pop up in the middle of that Christmas piece). For some reason, too, it seems like it’s most frequently the Christmas music that does this. Maybe partly because there are so many “favorites” that we’ve played year after year, such that they’ve accumulated memories and meanings and traditions to a degree that many other pieces haven’t. I mean, this will already be my third Christmas season post-Jen, and each year I’ve been pulled apart a bit emotionally over the gorgeous solo clarinet flourish at the end of the Mannheim Steamroller “Auld Lang Syne” that we play at every Christmas concert. It was Jen’s part before she left, and I loved hearing her play it, at band or when we’d practice together at home. I can’t easily sort out my love of the music from my love for her, so I have weird feelings about this bit now.
And this year, it kind of seems like our director has pulled out all the stops and decided to have us play a whole bunch of my fondest favorites from past Christmas concerts. Besides the perennial “Auld Lang Syne,” there’s “A Fresh Aire Christmas” and “Cantique de Noel,” in particular—as well as others that aren’t quite “favorites” on the same level, but are still full of nostalgia because of having played them before. Each Thursday rehearsal for the past month has been a joy, has filled me with excitement for the season and the music, has made me feel very alive…and yet, at the same time, alone. Actually, on this broader level, these feelings both are, but also kind of aren’t, about Jen. In part, they’re about the fact that there’s no one in my everyday life who enjoys, or really cares much about, Christmas, and its associated trappings and traditions, in the way that I do. Family members do, but they aren’t part of my day to day life. I get a tree, decorate, listen to Christmas music, bake…all alone. No one who ever actually sees any of my Christmas decor, cares at all. (I’m a bit of a paradox here—an atheist who loves Christmas—and this isolates me somewhat; I differ from most of my friends in being “into” Christmasy stuff at all, but also from family members who are “into” it, since I’m resolutely secular in my Christmasiness (my love of many traditional Christmas songs whose words, alas, are religious, notwithstanding)). Anyway, the thing is, to a large extent, this isn’t really new; Jen was never nearly as enthusiastic about Christmas as I was, either, and less so each year, toward the end, it seemed. Still, she at least was a presence at home who could admire, on some level, my decorating. AND, of course, there was band. One of my best memories of Christmases past revolves around coming home together after either the final rehearsal or possibly the actual holiday concert one year. This isn’t the sort of memory that’s about details; I just remember feeling so warm, and content, and high on life, and together. I think we talked that night about how wonderful being in band together was—the one thing in our introverted, homebody lives that brought us out to engage with the world, as part of our normal routine, that we loved to death, and that was not my thing or her thing, but ours. Almost like our weekly date night, if getting together with 30-odd other people can qualify as a “date.” Which, again, leaves me with some cognitive dissonance around what band means to me now. It’s enormously important to me, and I wouldn’t dream of leaving it—but at the same time, its meaning has absolutely changed, and I can’t entirely define the scope of that change. It’s not as simple as either, a) a piece of my pre-divorce life that I cling to for comfort even though it’s lost its former meaning, or b) a passion that’s wholly independent of my ex-marriage and thus unaffected by the disintegration of the latter. It’s both of these things, and neither. And it’s emblematic of many things in my life in this way.
It bears mention that experiences like what I’ve been talking about here have at times been triggered by non-Christmas-related band music, too. One vivid example has stuck in my mind. This is actually not from recent weeks, and its connection to band is indirect; I think it happened sometime this past summer, during our annual hiatus. I was at home alone one evening watching a movie, or a TV show; I have no idea what it was, at this point, but what’s important is that there was a scene in which a band started playing Souza’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” And it was a reflex action, instantaneous, with no conscious thought: in a burst of enthusiasm, I found myself singing along, waving my hands, tapping my feet, my body swinging back and forth as though marching, a huge grin on my face, like a total dork. It’s what we would have done, together, if that word still applied to us. I even sort of think that, caught up in the moment, for a split second some part of me experienced it as though she was there with me; glanced over at her spot next to me on the love seat and was almost surprised to find it empty. And then conscious thought caught up with me, and suddenly it was another of those moments of dipping into the well of grief, and in the span of a couple seconds I went from joyful, dorky exuberance to tears of despair.
If I had written this all down two or three weeks ago, when I first started thinking about doing so, it would probably have ended here. But I didn’t, and then, right before Thanksgiving, a new, separate thread of music-triggered nostalgia and music-linked grief began for me. On that Wednesday evening (the night before Thanksgiving), I went with a friend to see Bohemian Rhapsody, the Queen/Freddie Mercury biopic currently playing in theaters. If you know of it, and (in particular) know that it’s somewhat controversial and isn’t exactly being showered in accolades by most critics…yeah, I have some thoughts, but this isn’t the place for them. I’ll just say here that, limitations and problems aside, I enjoyed watching it, and leave it at that. What I am here to talk about is how, though I hadn’t even really thought about it beforehand, almost as soon as the movie started it dawned on me, powerfully, how wrong it was—and how much a sign of the larger wrongness in my life—for me to be seeing this movie without Jen. That this was totally a movie that, in the right order of things, we should have gone to together. (But, you know—as a still-married, still-happy couple; not, like, in the reality of the now.)
Maybe the first thing to be conveyed here is this: Although, of course, we would eventually connect through band and band music, and we certainly discovered lots of other music over the years that we both liked, when Jen and I met, our respective tastes in music were fairly different from each other’s. Of the music that she loved best, the portion that I liked at all was in a sort of “guilty pleasures” category—holdovers from my tastes at a younger age, music that I was a little embarrassed about still enjoying since it was so different from the sort of music that I most identified with. My own favorite music, in turn, I think mostly tended to bore her, early on. Over time, our tastes did rub off on each other to an extent, of course. But the one piece of genuine common ground between us, musically, when we first met, was Queen. We came to Queen music on equal footing, too: we each independently liked what we knew of it, but neither of us really knew all that much of it. And so, throughout our college years (when I, at least, got a little obsessed with them), we discovered especially their older albums, in all their quirky, flamboyant, intense, over-the-top glory, together. We lived together in our own little world of Queen-love that no one else fully inhabited with us. There were favorite songs, least favorites (such as anything written & sung by drummer Roger Taylor on the ’70s albums), in-jokes, goofy failed attempts at emulating Freddie’s incomparable singing, etc. I had almost forgotten, to tell the truth, how much Queen had been a part of “us” in those years. (To have forgotten this at all actually seems really weird, the more I think about it. I mean, our wedding (ice cream) cakes had the words “Let us cling together as the years go by, oh my love, my love” written on them in icing, for crying out loud—lines from the chorus of Queen’s “Teo Torriatte,” from A Day at the Races.)
So there were lots of little moments while watching the movie that had a similar effect on me to what I was talking about earlier with band music: the one-two punch of joyful nostalgia followed by pain. The only example that I really remember specifically, though, is a scene in which the other three band members poke fun at Roger Taylor over his songwriting contribution to their 1975 opus A Night at the Opera: the dippy, juvenile, ludicrous song “I’m in Love with my Car,” which Jen and I likewise used to mock mercilessly. It was a fun scene, but I couldn’t not think about how much fun it would have been for us to have experienced it together (again, if that were a word that still applied to us).
And because the movie really reawakened my enthusiasm for old Queen music, a day or two later I got around to doing something that I’d been meaning to do, off and on, for probably about a decade: I acquired a couple of the old Queen albums from iTunes that I hadn’t heard in years, because I previously only ever owned cassette versions of them. Thus, these past couple weeks, I’ve continued down the road of rediscovering these old friends, and they’ve continued to stir up old memories. Not in as intense or vivid a way as in the various moments that I’ve been describing here, necessarily, but still broadly similar in that getting back into these old albums has made me feel alive and engaged and present, but also nostalgic and sad. That just seems to be a big theme for me of late, I guess.
Hmm. This feels very abrupt and like not much of an ending, but I’m at the point where I seem to have exhausted what I had to say. I guess it’s like I said at the outset; no big point or deep insight, here…just some stuff that I’ve been experiencing that I needed to talk about.