There's a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust

A couple of weeks ago I learned, in short succession, of the deaths of two people. Neither person was someone I knew personally, but both were people who had played some small part in my life, and both deaths moved me deeply.

The morning of November 12, 2018 started like any other Monday, and then everything changed when I saw a friend's Facebook post reporting the shocking news that Nikki Delamotte had been murdered.

As I said, Nikki was not someone I knew personally, but her name was very familiar to me. A local journalist, I'd seen her name many times on wonderfully written articles about Cleveland's music and arts and culture scenes. As time progressed on that Monday I saw more and more posts popping up on my Facebook feed from friends expressing their grief and horror at the event. Many of the posts contained a picture of a face that was familiar to me despite my never having known her. I went to her Facebook profile and saw that I had 34 mutual friends with Nikki. She'd probably shown up in my "suggested friends" at some point. She'd undoubtedly been to a number of concerts and other events I'd attended. The more I read about her, the more I wished I had gotten to know her.

I felt a deep sense of grief for Nikki, for her family, for all my friends who had known her, and for our community for losing such a special figure. As details came out of her tragic death, I felt sickened at what had happened - at 30 years old and with such a bright future ahead of her, Nikki had reconnected with an uncle of hers she had not seen in years, and had made plans to go hang out with him, and then, after entering her uncle's trailer, had been shot to death by that uncle before he turned the gun on himself. It's one of the saddest things I think I've ever heard.

This isn't a political post, but I have to mention it. I hate guns.

It's rare for me to be moved so deeply by the death of a single person who I did not know, but Nikki's death deeply moved me, especially because of all the tributes and remembrances I saw my friends post.

One of those posts helped lead me to the line of thought that made me want to write this blog entry.

I have a friend named Annie who I met in a rather unusual way. I met her because when Cara died Annie, then an undergraduate student at Case, reached out to me to ask if I'd be willing to be interviewed for an article in Cara's memory in the Case student newspaper. I gladly granted the request, and the article turned out to be quite a beautiful tribute. Since then, our paths have occasionally crossed. Annie is now a reporter for cleveland.com writing primarily about music, and in the past year especially we've run into each other at a number of concerts. The most recent of those was the Case radio station WRUW's Studio-A-Rama music festival held in October, at which we were both excited to see headliner Lucy Dacus.

Annie was a coworker of Nikki's and was very close to her. On November 13, Annie shared the Lucy Dacus song "Pillar of Truth" and wrote this on Facebook:

I just remembered and wanted to share.

This song brought Nikki some comfort when her grandma passed away. She even got to see Lucy perform it live, the same day as her grandma's memorial. I remember that she was excited that she made it to Cleveland in time for Lucy's performance, after spending the evening driving back from Toledo.

I don't know but maybe now it can bring us a little bit of comfort too.

"Pillar of Truth" is a heartrendingly beautiful song that Lucy had described as being written about her own grandmother, and I was taken back to that night in October when I had stood there mesmerized by Lucy Dacus's performance of that song (the final song of the night), and there in the crowd not far from me had been Annie, and Nikki, as well. And I thought of the feelings that Nikki must have had that night, and that Annie must now have, for the story reminded me so much of things I myself had experienced in 2015. Things that in some way simultaneously feel like they could have been just the other week or could have been a lifetime ago.

I thought of seeing Lady Lamb perform at the Grog Shop on July 28, 2015, the day after Cara's grandmother Margie passed away, and little over three months from Cara herself's passing. And how the day after the show I had shared the song "Ten" (the final song of the night) on Facebook, tagging both Cara and Gram in the post, and quoted the line, "There's a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust on our eyes when our eyes finally close." That live performance of that song gave me some comfort after Cara's grandmother, who had become to me like my own grandmother, passed away, and I thought that perhaps what Nikki had felt at that Lucy Dacus concert was a little something like what I had felt at that Lady Lamb concert.

And I thought of seeing Sufjan Stevens perform at the Masonic Auditorium on April 16, 2015. Cara was supposed to go to that concert with me but ended up not going because she didn't feel well. Our good friend Troy ended up going with me instead. Troy, as it happens, was also a good friend of Nikki's and posted beautiful tributes to her as well. Cara and I had a tradition running back to very early in our friendship where when I was at a concert of an artist Cara liked and Cara wasn't at the concert with me, I would call her on the phone during the concert so she could listen to a song. There's one Sufjan Stevens song that was especially meaningful to us, because it was our wedding recessional. So when Sufjan played "Chicago" (the final song of the night), I called Cara.

It was the last time I would ever do that, because she passed away barely more than a week later.

So I thought that perhaps what Annie felt, thinking back on sharing a special concert experience with her friend who it turned out was unexpectedly short for the world, was a little something like what I had felt thinking back on that Sufjan Stevens concert after Cara's death.

The next day, November 14, was when I learned of the other death. There's a radio show on WJCU, the John Carroll University station, called Beautiful Mess (for the Diamond Rio song of the same name), that airs every Wednesday from 6-8 pm, and because I'm usually driving home during that time frame I often have it on in the car. It's a country music show, playing a wide variety of country and related genres from a wide range of years. I've been a listener of the show, albeit a casual one, for probably five years now. Which is kind of funny because as a kid and into my early adult years I couldn't stand country music. But I've become much more open-minded about music in general, and although I don't love all country music (especially the sort you'd most tend to hear on modern country radio), there's a lot I do enjoy. And the show Beautiful Mess has been one of the things that has helped broaden my tastes in that direction.

Anyway, the show is hosted by a woman named Holly, whose age I don't know but who I'd guess is a bit younger than me. Over the years one of the things I've most enjoyed about her show is how she started occasionally having her dad on as a guest DJ, co-hosting the show with her, and eventually it became a regular thing. And between songs you'd get to hear this father and daughter talking about the music and the memories that went with it. It was just one of the sweetest things.

For the previous show or two, there had been a substitute DJ for the show instead of Holly, but I hadn't thought much of it (and I'm usually only listening to the show for ten or fifteen minutes if I'm simply driving straight home). On November 14 I was driving to Target before going home, meaning I'd be spending a longer time with the show. Holly was back, and after a song finished she started talking, and at first I was only half-listening to what she was saying, but then it struck me somehow that she seemed to be talking about her dad in the past tense, and this feeling of dread overtook me, and I gave the words coming out of my car speakers my rapt attention, and soon it was confirmed for me. Her dad was gone.

Already full of sorrow that day because of Nikki's recent death, the sorrow in me grew for the rest of my drive. I remember sitting behind the steering wheel staring at the road and just feeling this immense feeling of loss for this man I had never met. And at the same time there was something beautiful about the way that Holly was using the songs on her show to try to begin to work through that horrible loss.

I don't know the details of Holly's dad's passing, but I do know it was unexpected. In the subsequent weeks, she's continued to use the show as a tribute to her dad. This past Wednesday found me with an unusually large amount of driving to do in the 6-8 pm time slot, and I listened as Holly described how she was carrying on with playing music her dad had picked out for the coming weeks on the show. I smiled at the appearance of "Piazza, New York Catcher" by Belle and Sebastian (a surprising selection for a country-centered show), remembering seeing it live in concert with Cara. I don't know whether that song was one Holly or her dad picked out. Perhaps they had a memory involving it too. My strong sense of sorrow returned as I listened to Holly's show this week, but as I've written before, feeling sad is not necessarily a bad thing.

As you might have picked up on, the theme that's emerging here is that I'm struck by the way music helps connect us to loved ones who have left this world. I think it's a special power that music can have and it's almost hard to describe it.

I have a few other anecdotes that have reinforced this to me.

A few months ago, Karyn and I were watching John McCain's funeral on TV. I remember being struck by how, throughout the lengthy proceedings, McCain's wife Cindy's face betrayed little emotion. There was just one moment when tears were evident. It was during a performance of an especially meaningful song.

Earlier this year, Karyn and I were watching the Tony Awards. (That, incidentally, is something I never would have imagined myself doing before meeting Karyn, but I'm glad we did it.) By far the most moving moment of the night came when students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School drama department, months after the horrific gun massacre at their school, took the stage and performed "Seasons of Love" from the musical Rent. It was so powerful and so beautiful and I remember Karyn and me sitting there side by side on the sofa, both awestruck, with tears forming in our eyes.

There's something really profound about the effect music can have on us and the way it can help us connect to lost loved ones. I'm fascinated by this phenomenon. Why does music have this power? Why, come to think of it, do we even have music? It's actually quite easy to imagine an alternate reality in which humans had never developed music and society was otherwise much the same as it is (in contrast to, for instance, the written word, the lack of which would result in a tremendously different society). And yet music must be something that we've had for a very long time. It existed, in fact, long before there were any humans. We aren't the only species that sings songs - so do many birds, and some whales, to name a couple of diverse examples. I find that music has an almost mystical power, and although I wouldn't presume that it has the same effect on everyone, I know I'm far from alone in feeling this way.

I have countless other examples of songs, particularly during live performances, stirring deep emotion in me because of their connections with Cara. I've written about many such instances in the past and I'm not going to go back over them here, but I did want to share one other personal anecdote. My Aunt Donna, my mom's oldest sister, passed away early last year from multiple system atrophy, a cruel disorder of the nervous system that presents as similar to Parkinson's. The last time I visited her, just days before her passing, while I was there she asked her husband Dave to look up and play a song. The song was "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night. Donna had requested that the song be played at her funeral. While listening to the song, Donna, who by that point had little remaining ability to control her muscles, was lightly moving her hand and head in time to the music. One of the other people in the room asked Donna if she was remembering dancing to the song.

"I was remembering joy," Donna corrected her faintly, for speaking was also becoming a struggle for her. Then she looked at me and continued, "Joy was Cara's middle name, wasn't it?"

I answered in the affirmative. "I'm going to dance with Cara in heaven," Donna said, one of the most touching things anyone has ever said to me. And I'd like to think she was right.