I learned last night that a singer who was important to me once has died. She died several months ago, as it turns out, but it was news to me. Or perhaps not. I had been thinking of her off and on over the past few weeks, or rather of her music, as first one of her songs, and then another drifted into and out of my mind for a few days. Somehow, I knew, so seeing the past tense in the search results did not shock or surprise me, as it so often has in recent years. Maybe I caught a fleeting glimpse of a headline awhile back, and put it away out of consciousness until I was ready for it to surface.

For a moment, when I saw the singer’s age, I thought, oh well, she was getting up there. Then I remembered my own age, which I often forget, and which is not much less than hers.

Savage Breast

Music meant a lot to me during my depressed years, validating the intensities of emotion that I lived in every day, but which were regarded as excessive by others. Though I couldn’t have told you so then, I recognized in this singer our mutual unhealed wound of being an unloved child.

But when I started treating my depression, I stopped listening to songs of pain. I had spent so much of my life there already. There were other things I wanted to feel, once I could.

River in Egypt

I have spent Pandemic Year Two reading through the prolific catalog of a 20th century fiction writer, in order of publication. She was an engaging enough storyteller, if not a very convincing one. I came to dislike the underlying woman for her arrogance and hatreds, but the progression was an interesting psychological study of how an externally-identified mind navigates social change. Not well, as it turns out.

Maybe that explains current politics.

I do feel some compassion for her late life fears, as bafflingly overblown as they seem considering that she had already weathered two world wars. Her nostalgia for a former age that never was didn’t comfort her. It only made her measure present reality against a fantasy of the past, a guaranteed fail.

Note to self – don’t do this.

A Lot of Living

Somewhere around mid-middle age we start to notice death. Peers and cultural icons of our youth slip away in ever increasing numbers. For some, this becomes an unendurable burden of sorrow and isolation. I guess it is a moment of challenge:

Which do you choose, unvarnished life, or dream?

When I started treating my depression, I looked back on decades of preventable anguish, and attempts to seek help from people who ought to have seen how much I needed it, but didn’t. But I couldn’t spend long on that review. After all, given the state of mental health treatment in America, there is no guarantee I’d have been better off. Mostly, I didn’t want to waste any more time.

The More Things Change

Maybe that is why I have come out the other end of that phase in life where the inevitability of death becomes a lot less remote. I’m a long way from done, and I want to get on with it. Accepting the reality of the present is not always easy. In fact, it has been quite difficult the past few years, and I’m still wrestling with it. But is it really worse than any other time, or is it only that I am now inescapably confronted with what I previously chose to ignore?

Either way, for better and for worse, in consolation or anxiety, deal with it or run from it, as it ever was, is, and will be…

This, too, shall pass.