Journeys - Excerpt from May 2001 Issue
Music Helps Me Grieve
By Michael Whitman
My wife and I once received a gift so full of love and grace that although it made us weep about the death of our son, Breck, it helped me discover how music comforts and supports us in our grief and mourning.
The day before we flew across the country for Breck's funeral, a close friend who is a composer played us a song that had come to her immediately after learning of our loss. Her song captured our desperate longing, our bargaining and tearful begging to undo the new reality of life without our child. Had we been able to write a song about the pain of knowing our child had died suddenly and alone, hers is what we would have written.
In the months that followed, I didn't care why listening to certain music helped me. I was grateful to have found a non-prescription remedy for my emotional instability. Music now accompanied me daily, opening my spirit up to insightful messages from songwriters who had lived through great losses of their own. When I listened to a well-written song and felt the same emotion the composer may have been working through when he created it, that work became a treasured gift to me.
In some cases, it was obvious that the composer had walked in my shoes. My experience confirmed that music can truly be a wide and open path to emotion. It's unique ability to comfort and heal in my own life made me realize what a powerful healing force it could be for many people.
I helped put together an anthology of memorial songs as a benefit album for my local hospice organization. What started as a self-healing process became a memorial project to produce a music resource for others. Many of the songs are so beautiful, moving, and wise that they can be an effective stress reducer. Often written as a release for musicians' own grief and pain, they contain themes familiar to anyone mourning the death of someone close.
Accepting the fact and finality of a death does take time; having had no chance to say goodbye before any sudden death can cause longlasting,sometimes unresolvable, pain; and although the rest of the world seems to move on quickly after our loved ones' deaths, we will never forget them.
Bereavement support group participants know that "group" can often be the place to deal with topics to which most of our friends or co-workers can't relate. Listening to songs is no substitute for the benefits of talking and sharing our stories with others who may understand or relate. However, the topic of a song may highlight an aspect of grief that may be particularly relevant or real in our lives. So that song can be an extension of the support community. The music's comforting emotional medicine counteracts some of the intense pain of loss.
* For more information on the memorial anthology mentioned, Before Their Time: Memorial Songs and Music, visit http://www.beforetheirtime.org. All sales revenue benefits hospice and suicide prevention organizations.
* This article appeared in the May, 2001 issue of Journeys.
