The Music Didn't Die With Him.

I just forgot how to turn it back on.

Photo by Karl Hörnfeldt on Unsplash

It’s been seven months, I say. That’s enough. Stop it right now.

Grief is quiet.

Snowflakes glitter on the sidewalks under the light of century-old street lamps. They give flimsy cover to the dead leaves in my yard. Next door, they sparkle around a family of Costco reindeer. Three topiary forms of silver wires threaded with tiny white lights and brilliant ruby bows are the heralds of Christmas on this Saturday night after Thanksgiving.

Grief’s silence is that of an unrepentant child, who knows that ice has already formed under the still-falling snow.

“I can’t do this,” I tell my neighbor. She’s standing wide-eyed in my entryway. “I was going to bring this to share. Please take it. Enjoy.”

I hand her a chilled bottle of pinot gris and a canvas tote filled with charcuterie and cheese. Zip-loc bags of Cotswold cheddar, Havarti, Brie, Jarlsberg. A crimped-aluminum round of Boursin. Prosciutto, salami, fig jam. Glazed pecans, snapped into a plastic container. Sobbing, ashamed, I cast my eyes around the living room for any explanation. Why can’t I just walk across the street and have a glass of wine with some kind, sympathetic friends?

Next to the sofa, a Sonos speaker. On the desk, a turntable.

“There’s no music,” I finally say. “No music in the house. Not —”

Oh, Christ. How whiny I sound. How idiotic.

“Since he died.”

She nods. Maybe she’s thinking Can’t she download Spotify? Or ask Alexa for soft jazz?

“If you change your mind —”

Can she even change a lightbulb?

With the sack of food in one hand and the wine in the other, she crosses the street back to her house, where people are already gathered. Even though the snow continues to fall lightly and unhurriedly, her footprints disappear right away.

---

I'm told that the first year following a spouse’s death is the worst.

First year = worst year. Is this cliché reified only because it’s short and it rhymes? On what date in 2024 does Easter fall? Will I then emerge from this hollowed-out state shining and whole? (It falls on March 31st. Does that mean I get to exit this somber half-life three weeks earlier than expected?)

I’ve been in this gray, liminal space since April. I’ve collected my husband’s belongings at the hospice, contacted relatives and friends, and negotiated my way through the funeral industrial complex and financial and government bureaucracies while trying to remember how to eat and sleep and brush my teeth.

I sit in his study, staring at his book-lined walls. For some reason, the ones written by Joan Didion have migrated from my shelves to his.

I find Play it as it Lays. The White Album. A Book of Common Prayer. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. After Henry. Blue Nights. I don’t find the one I was looking for: The Year of Magical Thinking.

He’d managed to take the one guidebook I thought I needed. I remember, vaguely, a few salient parts of her story.

• She’d found her husband, John Gregory Dunne, dead of a heart attack at the dinner table.

Check.

~ I’d come back to his hospice room after a three-minute absence to find that he’d left this world.

• She’d kept his shoes in the closet, because he’d need them to wear them when he returned.

Check.

~ I’d given away a pair of his slippers on BuyNothing and regretted it immediately. Panicked, I wanted to send a message to the recipient, asking for them back. They were an expensive Christmas gift — suede, fleece-lined — that were too small. But maybe they would fit him now. Don’t bodies shrink a size or two, after death?

• His sweaters. When it got chilly, he could put one on.

Check.

~ Sweaters were my default Christmas gifts to him, during the forty-three years of our marriage. They are still on hangers or folded carefully in his drawers. He’d kept them all. But the one I took out and draped over his favorite chair was the ratty gray cardigan he’d been wearing when we met.

Finally, hoping that I might be able to learn from the writer I’ve both loved and disdained since discovering her at age seventeen, I look up a few quotes on Goodreads. One stands out:

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

Check.

“Hey. I can’t figure out this turntable. I’ve plugged it in, unplugged it, checked the wires, made sure no circuits are blown. Turned knobs. For more than an hour. All I want is to play Appalachian Spring, because snow is falling and there are icy spots already and maybe I can invoke, the reindeer will take flight, the sidewalks will clear, and Grief will dissolve in a soft, cleansing rain. You and I can cross the street together and drink wine with friends. When we come home, pleasantly tipsy, you can show me how Sonos works and how to get this record to spin and the music will come back to life, and we will live again. Where’s the magic in magical thinking?”

Do I really utter these flowery, crafted sentences? Of course not.

“What the fuck. Stop messing with me, asshole. I feel like a moron. How do I work this goddamn thing?”

That’s what I say.

---

I disconnect the Sonos speaker and take it upstairs. It hurts to much to look at it, thinking of the playlists he’d so carefully assembled. I decide to try the record player one more time. Reaching across the clear plastic cover, feel my way behind the polished surface and armature that will spin some of his life into mine. And there it is: the toggle switch.

I set down the needle.

Music: resurrected. Alive.