I’ve been thinking about music for a few reasons lately. I recently spoke to a colleague about working on a music book project this summer. I’m terribly excited by the prospect. The book has to do with widowhood, so it feels perfect in many ways. I’ve also been reading Facebook posts by friends who share the “top 10 albums that have stayed with you over the years.” I don’t think I could narrow it to ten, but I’m thinking and trying.

Then I had a conversation with another friend about the music of our childhoods, during which we discovered a mutual love of Neil Diamond that comes from the fact that our parents loved and played Diamond’s music when we were young. Like the memory of cruising to the zoo, I can put on Diamond’s Holly Holy or Cracklin’ Rose and, with the first strums of the guitar, I’m immediately taken back to springtime Saturday mornings, doing chores while these records played on the turntable that was built into a stereo cabinet the size of a VW bus that occupied most of our living room. The windows were cranked open to let fresh air in and the volume was cranked up as loudly as my mother felt was respectable. 

Having now lost my mom just over a year ago, I’m also reminded of the several times that my sister and I took her to see Neil perform in concert. Mom worked on an assembly line for GM, cutting and sewing the fabric that would become car interiors. She worked forty-plus-hour-weeks and then worked another several hours each night with household duties. We always had a full meal for dinner (which we always ate together), and the house was pristine. My memories of Mom at those concerts, standing with us, swaying to the music, her arms raised in the air, are now some of the few times I really remember her feeling and acting carefree. They are powerful memories that sustain, and that come back to me readily after the first notes.

Oliver Sacks’ fascinating book Musicophelia, and Daniel Levitan’s equally interesting Your Brain on Music, both address the idea of music from a neurological perspective, including how we remember music, from individual notes to complete symphonies. For me, music is so closely tied to memories that—with older songs especially—the two seem intertwined in my brain. That has certainly been the case where music and memories of Kevin are concerned. I can’t consider our meeting, dating, marriage, or the time of his illness without also thinking of the music we shared.

We first connected over our mutual interest in the Clash. He borrowed albums I had purchased from the import bin at Dearborn Music and told me about going to their concert at a high school gym in Grand Rapids. When we moved in together a year later, the amount of duplication in our record collection spoke of two people with very similar tastes. They differed at some points, and Kevin quickly learned to accommodate my enduring love of the music of Queen and other 70’s rock bands that he had come to disdain. We also attended concerts together, some twenty or so over the years: everyone from Echo and the Bunnymen, to the Rolling Stones, to David Bowie, U2, and Bob Dylan. We made mix tapes for each other and for our kids—the first one for our son made while he was still in utero. We hung out at record stores like Schoolkids and Wazoo. We visited Johnny Cash’s grave and the bronze statue memorial to Freddie Mercury in Montreaux, Switzerland. We named our first puppy Mustang Sally.

So when Kevin was diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo treatment, it wasn’t surprising that music was part of that as well. At first, he made his own mix lists on his iPod, some songs soothing, some closer to battle cries. The radiology technicians plugged his iPod into their speaker system while he lay on the table bolted in under plastic mesh, and he put his headphones on as soon as he walked into the chemotherapy room. For round two, he solicited music from the many friends who read his carepages blog, agreeing to add anything that was suggested, even country songs and rap. The suggestions poured in and the list--over 200 songs which are still on our iTunes program--include Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong, Bill Withers’ Lean on Me, Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J, a very fast version of Amazing Grace by the Dropkick Murphys, and Beethoven’s Symphony #3 in E Flat, Op.55, Eroica.

Kevin absolutely loved this list. It connected him to everyone that was out there supporting him during his worst days. The music cheered him, strengthened him, calmed him, and gave him nourishment as certainly as any food. He listened to these songs as the anesthesia took effect before his two spinal cord surgeries. He spent forty-five days in the hospital before his last two weeks at home. Every night, the last thing I did before leaving for home, or curling up on the chair next to him if I could stay overnight, was to put his earphones on and turn the iPod to “Chemo List #2.” The drugs knocked him out each night, but the music allowed him to sleep.

He told me that he had two favorites on the list: Dylan’s Ring Them Bells and Three Dog Night’s Shambalah. It was the closest thing we had to time spent planning a memorial service—I took that conversation as an indication that he wanted those songs played in remembrance. They were, along with several others. It was a music-filled service, as he would have wanted.

Of course I could not listen to this playlist, or even one or two of the songs on it, for the past three years. It’s still difficult to listen to Ring Them Bells or Shambala or Wonderful Life or Joe Strummer’s version of Redemption Song. I wondered sometimes, if those songs were lost to me forever, their tunes and words just too painful to have in my life. I knew my relationship to music was forever changed. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. So much of what we shared is just all around me, waiting for me to deal with on my own without any choice. But songs can be turned off or avoided altogether. It has taken some time, but I'm gradually putting the headphones back on and making music a part of my everyday.

I've managed, I suppose, to come to a different place. Now, when "Kevin songs" pop up on my random playlist, I simply let the tears come and embrace the time as a few minutes that I can spend in the comfort of memories. 

And I know that the memories will always come along with the music. Someday I’ll put the music on and dance, but for now it’s ok to just sit and listen.