Memorial*

I suppose even moments of great triumph or indescribable loss make no visible impression in or on the places they occur. They leave shadows in our own personal memories, shadows that never really disappear. 

We're all touched by such events in one way or another. At least, in this case, I was.  After all, in this case, the victims--and it hurts to call them that but they were--were colleagues, neighbors, friends, and actual relatives.  They lived just down at the end of our block, and I know there's nothing here to commemorate the story.

When they lost their son, the entire community shook--their oldest, so talented, seemed so clearly destined to continue his father's significant legacy that only God himself could have created such clear design.  But then, if God did it, where on earth was He when their son was killed?  A job interview had been set, the kid was bright, creative, all things were in order, the music of the spheres was in the air, planets in a row.

And then an accident in traffic. Death.

That immense loss simply stopped the joy that music had always given our neighbor, both in performance and composition.  Inspiration was snuffed when his son's life was. I'm not sure how people walk to work again, much less how they dream or create anything after such unthinkable loss. For the man at the end of the block, composition ceased.  After all, what is composition, really, but this great human desire to create order, to make sense of things?  "People without hope don't write novels," Flannery O'Connor once wrote. People without hope don't write music either. Artists take snippets of our lives and theirs, sometimes jagged and horrifying, and somehow create a tapestry.

In the wake of his son's death, our neighbor's composition stopped, his creativity vanished.  The death of a child, like no other event, I'm told, kills the spirit. It reverses the order we know by instinct, programmed as we are to believe that someday we'll bury our parents. No parent ever dreams she'll bury a daughter or son.


So this musician, our neighbor and friend and cousin, froze in grief from the moment someone called to say their son was dying half a continent away, their son the musician. But it wasn't just the loss of his life that ushered in darkness.  His death--like the death of children everywhere--shutters vision because, especially in this story, everything had been in place, perfectly designed and set that when he was killed, his death destroyed order itself, leaving only chaos.  In the madness, our neighbor lost strength and faith and vision and the sheer will to make order, to make music he had been making his entire life.

Here's what happened. I know the story. His wife finally told her husband to leave, to go to his office at school and write.  She wanted him to write. He had to write, had to create, she said.  He had to say what it was that he felt in his heart, had to say it in his language, the language of music.  So he left, walked out of the house just down the block.

Didn't return for lunch, didn't return for dinner.  And when, that night, he finally walked home, he stepped in the door and laid the composition on the table in front of his wife, as if to say, "There--I did it."

What he'd written, some say, has become the best of his work-- "A Song of Triumph," the musical story of his grief and his consolation, an anthem whose richness is created, like the psalms of David, by equal portions of dissonance and harmony, despair and faith.

All of that was 35 years ago.  Thirty-five years.  Today, that son of theirs, had he taken the teaching job that seemed inevitable, had he moved into an office in his father's own music department, would be 62 years old. 

Our neighbors are gone now, with God's blessing to a place we all would like to believe music abounds.

I had their grandson in class my last semester teaching, and I liked him.  He seemed interested, but he didn't know exactly where his grandparents had lived when they lived here in town, didn't know the house, didn't know the back door his grandpa must have walked in one night years ago, holding "A Song of Triumph" in hand to show his wife, the woman who threw him out and told him he had to tell the story, in music.  

When I heard that part of their story for the first time, when I heard a musicologist explain exactly why the richness of that anthem exceeds most anything else our neighbor had ever written and how that piece is still being sung by thousands of voices, I couldn't help but think that it's a shame so much of the story is no longer here in the neighborhood.  Today, who knows anymore?--who remembers?  Shouldn't there be a plaque on the lawn?  Shouldn't we at least try to stop time's relentless march?  Do our great moments of joy and grief and sorrow simply disappear like sunlight?  

Thank goodness for songs of triumph.  Thank goodness she told him not to return until he'd written something, anything.  Thank goodness, once upon a time a father, struck to the heart with grief, sat down in his office and emptied his soul in notation, in a richly human attempt to make harmony out of dissonance, create order out of chaos.

In the neighborhood where we once lived, no one knows that story.

Thank God there's the music, a song of triumph.  What a song. What a triumph. Just three doors down it happened. Someone should know.

Listen for yourself. Here it is. 

_______________________ 
*first published here February 1, 2012