Death Letter Blues: how music helps us grieve
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When my mother died I clung to music, at times to expel my grief and at times to go deeper into it. How else could I explore such an unfamiliar country? In the months after she died, a deep inner winter fell on me; a beautiful landscape of frosted branches, iced lakes and white snow lying in great drifts. I needed to spend time in this strange place, and the only way I could reach it was through music. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s sublime and subtle soundtrack to the film of Cormac McCarthy’s dark post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, could help me push through the coats at the back of the wardrobe. The music and the landscape were inseparable within me.
Music allows us to approach the enormity of death, to touch its sides and try to imagine its true shape as it glides silently into view; the formless outline of a whale passing under our tiny boat.
Following the death of his son, Nick Cave’s 2019 album, Ghosteen, navigates these boundless oceans in a dreamlike state, searching out the beautiful shafts of coloured light that filter through to the depths. From the ethereal Bright Horses, that floats by like a cloud (“The bright horses have broken free from the fields, they are the horses of love, their manes full of fire”), to the devastating moment towards the end of the album when,
“Sea creatures rise out of the sea
And I’m standing on the shore
Everyone begins to run
The kid drops his bucket and spade and climbs into the sun.”
Over time, I have come to see music and grief as utterly entwined; grief itself playing out like a grand musical composition that stirs and shakes us, and we can train our ears to hear the different notes and harmonies within the cacophony. As we slowly tune in to grief’s different notes, we can tame it, like learning a new and strange instrument.
I started to recognise three distinct notes amid the din, pushing and pulling against each other; three types of grief, each with its own tone; its own palate: loss, trauma, and mortality itself.
Loss is confusing and desperate — a riddle with no answer, the sound of one hand clapping. How can someone be no more? In Tank Park Salute, a song Billy Bragg wrote about the death of his father, he likens death to a “pale moon in a summer sky”, and remembers,
“Some photographs of a summer’s day
A little boy’s lifetime away
Is all I’ve left of everything we’ve done.”
Someone you love has simply disappeared and their absence is enormous; you can still feel the weight of their arm linked in yours as you walk down the street.
And what of trauma? Often overlooked, but nonetheless potent — an unexpected phone call in the night, long echoing corridors, the sight of a corpse. These are traumatic events that fill your head with restless black feathers. The raw, sudden and brutal reality of death is laid bare and is shocking. It is trauma you can hear in Son House’s wailing voice as he sings Death Letter Blues: they tell him his “gal is dead”, and when he gets to her, there she is, “layin’ on the cooling board”.
The third note that is struck is the deep resonant clang that tolls for your own inevitable demise. Psychologists call this mortality salience — our existential anxiety. We’re all going to die. We have always known this, but to witness the death of another — from distant drum beat to clattering end — can feel like you have skipped to the very last page of the book. You have peeked under the bed to where the wild things are and experienced the raw uncensored reality of how your own family will close the lid when your time comes.
“Whoooah Death, won’t you spare me over ’til another year?” Moans Ralph Stanley, but Death just replies: “No wealth, no land, no silver or gold / Nothing satisfies me but your soul.”
Loss, trauma, and mortality. At first these hit us as a discordant noise — we cannot distinguish each note, there is no subtlety, no harmony. The chaos threatens to overwhelm us. But something happens over time. You attune to this song of grief. On a bus — overcome — you can identify the sound ringing in your ears, “Ah” you think, “this is loss. I am feeling loss”.
Eventually, you become the conductor, the composer and the lead soloist; the notes of grief harmonise into something beautiful, frightening and colourful. “Do you realise?” sings Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, “that everyone you know, some day will die,” but there is no bleakness here; the music vaults and sparkles, and lifts us spinning to the very edges of space, exulting us to bring death into our lives; to free us from mundanity and so much wasted time. This is the song of grief.
