On Grieving and Finding Hope

Sometimes, death brings out something horrible in us.  By “us” I mean those of us who survive, those of us left behind.  Sometimes it makes us mean, ruthless, and cruel to those around us and so we turn inward and ignore the outside world.  Sometimes it convinces us that we’ve been living lies and that we’ve only got a short time to change.

Other times, death brings out something wonderful.  It can lead us to celebrate the lives of those that are gone, pushing us to better ourselves as a tribute to the departed.  It can spur us to rekindle relationships and connections that have been severed over time, either from abuse or neglect.  And at times, death can bring us to create something beautiful, something extraordinary.

So I guess it shouldn’t be odd that two of the finest albums released this year find themselves preoccupied with severe and terminal illness, but somehow it is.  And maybe the oddness is not so much in the choice of theme as it is in the presentation of the material.  The first of these, by the Eau Claire, Wisconsin trio The Daredevil Christopher Wright, is called In Deference to a Broken Back.  The title refers to the condition of bassist Jason Sunde prior to the band forming and the album is a series of vignettes, most of which revolve in some way around dealing with mortality.

One would expect such an album to be morose and moody, but therein lies the oddness.  The music on this album is upbeat and creative, bouncing with a vibrancy that you would expect from someone who has cheated death, not someone facing it head on.  And that’s the charm of this album I believe, that it skirts the line between fearing death and sneering at it–all with tongue firmly in cheek.

The album opens with the lines “I died on the way to the hospital, I died.”  A little later, “You cried on the way to the funeral, you cried.”  Through these words we start a journey through each song, which gives us another glimpse into another experience of facing mortality.  These are short plays held together by shared subject matter and wrapped in bright, sometimes even jangly, pop songs.

“A Conversation About Cancer” shows the bands versatility, starting out with someone saying “It’s going to be completely chaotic” with the music moving into an uptempo polka.  The singer explains how one character found hope in the story of David and Goliath, which teaches her about a love that is “stronger than cancer”.  This in turn gives hope to the main character, who is greeted “like the prodigal son” upon his return home from cancer treatments.  The song should be a complete downer, but instead it is a happy trip, insisting “Heaven is the place that we’re going” where “no one will ever be sick”.  The song ends as an anthem, “screaming to the people in the mezzanine who say I don’t know.”

I’m trying hard not to fall into hyperbole, but The Daredevil Christopher Wright has done something special on this album.  They have taken a subject that takes the best from us and turned it into something that can bring out the best in us, allowing us to see past our immediate grief to find solace in the connections we make with others.  Strangely, this album is able to take something as scary and gloomy as our mortality and turn it into a celebration.

Contrasting this approach is what may very well be the best album of 2009, The Antlers’ Hospice.  Let me be clear:  Listening to Deference can leave you in a great mood despite the subject matter, but there is no way you are walking away from Hospice with dry eyes.  No.  Freaking.  Way.  Not if you take the album seriously.

But given that, front man Peter Silberman has created a work of art that is utterly profound and cathartic.  Spending time with Hospice is like dealing with closeted skeletons long forgotten–opening the door and letting the light in is painful but afterward you find yourself cleansed, free of guilt and shame.

Hospice tells the harrowing story of a nurse in the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who cares for a patient dying of bone cancer.  The patient is crazed, a “hurricane thunderclap”, who is driven to near insanity by pain, medication and long hours of treatment.  At the point where the album narrative picks up, there is no hope of recovery and the nurse’s only goal is to provide as comfortable an existence as possible for the dying patient.

Silberman uses soft tones, lush chord arrangements and muted vocals to create a sonic landscape that puts the listener right in the middle of the situation.  The songs on Hospice are nothing short of beautiful and anthemic, and they are written as if the notes themselves mourn for the patient who is clinging desperately to life.

The songs take us through the gamut of emotions, sparing nothing.  The nurse gets frustrated and enraged over the patient’s difficulty:  ”Sylvia, get your head out of the oven!  Go back to screaming and cursing, remind me again how everyone betrayed you…Let me take your temperature, you can throw the thermometer right back at me, if that’s what you want to do, okay?”

“Someone, oh anyone, tell me how to stop this.  She’s screaming, expiring, and I’m her only witness.”  Through this shared experience, the two people form a bond that lasts through Sylvia’s death near the end of the album.  At the end, the nurse survives, left with conflicting feelings and memories of their time together.  ”When I try to move my arms sometimes, they weigh too much to lift.  I think you buried me awake, my one and only parting gift.”

The pain here is exquisite, but real.  For anyone who has been through the slow death of someone close to them, the entire album will ring true.  This could be any of us at any time, and what is remarkable about this album is that after we have experienced it we will realize that these are the situations that can bring out the best in us.

And we realize that those of us left behind have a choice.  It’s not that death either brings out the worst or the best, it’s that we choose which part to let out.  Through vastly different sounds and textures, both bands reaffirm the truth once expressed as “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, life goes on, brah!”  Deference teaches us to remain hopeful and happy in the face of incredibly sad situations.  Hospice teaches us that the survivior’s dignity can serve as a surrogate for the dying person’s, thereby allowing the dying to maintain humanity.  But Hospice also recognizes that doing this carries a cost for the living.  Even though we remain behind, it is not without scars.  But maybe it is those scars that in some ways define our humanity.