music & healing (9:30 am)

In typical "I don't like technology" fashion, I can't figure out how to get my posts to display the time along with the date, so, I'll start typing the times out now. An hour and a half in and about 3/4 way through my first coffee drink. It's a windy, rainy day here in South Florida so it's the perfect day to sit inside.

I wanted to take this post to talk about music. I giggle whenever I type out "I love music" because it reminds me in that part of "Away We Go" ("who doesn't like music?"). I do this thing there I sentimentally attach certain songs to certain events or people and no matter how many years pass by, I can't undo the connection. Case in point: I'm Feeling It by Blink-182. I heard that song for the first time the day my husband left for college (I was still a senior in high school so, you know, it was the worst imaginable news). For a good two weeks I skipped last period (sorry, mom) and ate my body weight in Roadhouse Grill rolls in the restaurant parking lot while blaring the song through my car speakers. A decade later and I still can feel exactly how it felt listening to that song in that parking lot while shoveling dozens of rolls into my face. (Hooray for teenage melodrama.)

When I was a teenager, my aunt passed away after losing her fight with cancer. It was the first time I understood that death can take away someone young and seemingly healthy, someone with young children and a life that was just beginning to be lived. I had previously assumed that only the old die at the end of a full and long life, but with my aunt's tragic passing came the realization that that isn't always true. Prior to her diagnosis, my aunt and I would always listen to that song Together Again by Janet Jackson. It had just come out and I was too pretentious to imagine giving Janet Jackson a chance, but my aunt loved that song and so we always listened to it together. She bought me the album and I secretly loved it. When she passed away, I sat with my discman on and listened to that song on repeat over and over again. Coincidentally, I heard that song for the first time in years on the '90's on 9 channel the day before we learned Wylie wouldn't be able to come home alive. I later heard that song on an easy listening station the day that she died, playing softly in the background. It's now a song that I associate with great loss, tragic loss, and with two of the most incredible women I know -- my aunt Rina and my daughter Wylie.

The day we left Wylie's viewing, we got in the car and "Always Be My Baby" by Mariah Carey had just begun playing. It was a song I knew, of course, growing up when I did, but it wasn't one I'd ever listened to the words do. But that time I listened, I let the tears just explode from my body as I soaked up every last word in that song. Mariah Carey didn't annoy me in that minute. It was as if she was speaking to me, just that once, at that moment in time.

We were as one babe
For a moment in time
And it seemed everlasting
That you would always be mine

Now you want to be free
So I'm letting you fly
'Cause I know in my heart babe
Our love will never die, no

You'll always be a part of me
I'm a part of you indefinitely
Boy don't you know you can't escape me
Ooh darling, 'cause you'll always be my baby

And we'll linger on and on
Time can't erase a feeling this strong
No way you're never gonna shake me
Ooh darling, 'cause you'll always be my baby