Dear Grandma: some thoughts on Stick Season, and bearing loss
from Boston Magazine
In this drafty excerpt of a letter to my Grandma, I am (unexpectedly to me) thinking about Noah Kahan, and his album Stick Season. Which is really to say that I am thinking about music—and art and people and faith—and the things that make this life, and our losses, more bearable. And the living on more possible.
…
Dear Grandma,
I’m on a plane, spontaneously and unexpectedly crying while listening to the Fenway Park Live version of “All My Love” by Noah Kahan. Noah would have been after your time—and I realize now that I’m not even sure what your favorite genres of music were. I’ll need to ask my mom to fill in that gap. At any rate, I’m on a plane heading home for another funeral, and I just started weeping unexpectedly.
In the Spring, about a week after Grandpa died, I was in the car, on my way home from Yoga, and I also started weeping—the kind of weeping that you can’t imagine ending when you’re in the middle of it. That time “Everywhere, Everything” was filling my car like a symphony. And I wept thinking about the love that you and Grandpa shared. And how unimaginable it was that we had lost both of you.
It occurs to me that this music has become something like a soundtrack for this season of life—this season of grief, and loss, and compounded loss. Of what it means, what it has meant, to lose you and Grandpa. To lose you, and then Grandpa. To lose Grandpa, and to feel the compounded nature of your loss fall right back on top of it—almost two years after you were gone. Which maybe isn’t even the right math because so many of us felt like you left us long before you took your last breath.
But, I digress. Because I’m weeping on this plane, and I’m simply trying to write a quick note about Noah Kahan. It embarrasses me, often, to find such affinity with white music—which I simply mean as music made by white people. It embarrasses me to feel so deeply because of something they have made, and the ways that they have shared it. But my feelings about this album, about Noah Kahan’s feelings, his sadness, his loss, on display are more visceral than any other connection to art and music that I can remember. I am crying on this plane because I am realizing how lucky I am to experience someone else’s grief, in the midst of navigating my own. Noah Kahan writes about losing love and place and self, and every time I listen to his album (which has been a lot this year), I feel like I remember something new about how to live. Or about how hard it can be to live. I learn something new about how we lose and how we grieve.
It is a gift that we give one another, I think. Providing new words, new perspective, to the ways that we—mere mortals—conceive of loss. It seems to help me, at least, to have new ways to frame it. Even if the losses are different. It’s the way that the music sits in your body, how it can mean something new—or something old that you now remember—about the ways that we belong or feel heard and seen and known in this world.
I don’t really know what kind of losses you experienced during your lifetime, Grandma, except for when your mom died. The memory of you turning the corner of the first pew to follow her casket at the conclusion of Mass, is an image that has been seared in my mind for over twenty years. Which is hard to believe. But I think that seeing my Grandma cry for the first time is something that I won’t soon forget. I don’t know what losses you experienced, beyond that one. If you ever needed to feel seen or heard or known in the ways that I have needed it over these years and months. I don’t know what losses you experienced. But I hope that you found the music or the writing or the faith or the people who were necessary to get you through that time. I hope you found what you needed.
