Laura Lentz
21 June 2024
My boyfriend had been dead four minutes and I was asleep when he my nudged my arm. Baby, he said, I have something to tell you.
Oh, God, I said, seeing him on the edge of my bed, knowing there was a snowstorm between us…knowing he was sick, and of course just KNOWING what this could possibly mean.
This can’t be good, I said out loud – and then the phone rang and really woke me up. His daughter told me, in between sobs, that he had died in the middle of the snowstorm that had kept us apart, and in a moment I was the wife answering the door, the widow without a ring on Christmas morning.
After his funeral, where people I had never met lined up for blocks, wrapping around a small church he never attended – when my friends were getting high in the living room of Virginia’s apartment, I went to lay down, and that’s when he came to me again, gently waking me up, his hand on my forearm.
Music was playing in the other room, the notes gently sliding under my bedroom door – Talking Heads singing same as it ever was, while my friends laughed and cried in the background.
Baby, he said, with his ocean eyes – I have some things to tell you.
He had come to say goodbye, so excited by death he could barely contain himself, and it felt rude to me at the time – me so young in grief, and him so free and happy in this other world that did not yet belong to me, but he explained the dead don’t feel grief the same way.
He was kneeling on the floor like he could stay, then sitting on my bed with his legs crossed, and then he told me he couldn’t stay, that this would be our last communication.
When I met this man, we danced a lot. Mostly slow dancing as a prelude to wet, to hard, to flames that licked both our bodies when we got near each other. Sounds came out of the deepest part of me that never left my body when I had been with other men.
I entered my Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong period beside him, a period I never returned from. We danced to All of Me in my kitchen while I was cooking, my garlic fingers wrapped around his neck.
Her one perfect octave like a songbird entering the all of us.
Love spills.
Love sings.
Love is always a prelude to grief, because if we didn’t love so hard, if we didn’t jump into the fire with all our clothing on, we would never have scars to show for the love when it leaves us.
His breath, when it mingled with mine always smelled of cigars and onions and tomorrow.
After he explained the great forgiveness, after he explained God by not explaining God in the way any of us would expect (he had been an atheist) – after showing me the doorways of death, and how magnificent what was behind each door, he had one last message for me, and today I give that message to you:
He said….music is the language between all the worlds.
And just like that, he was gone, no notes lingering in the air, no hum, no lullaby, no Billy Holiday crooning take all of me.
Just gone.
Today I want to remind you that it’s through music we reground, we enter love, we discover our voices. Through music we grieve, reemerge and sometimes rage.
The mockingbird serenaded my lovemaking with another man ten years later, when my thighs learned to sing again.
Songs come from the whales, the songbirds, the frogs and the crickets, the earth. Langston Hughes said, I’ve been waiting long for an earth song.
Maya Angelou tells us why the caged bird sings.
The ancient text of the Perek Shirah, literally means “a Chapter Of Song,” reminding us that everything on the earth has a voice, and sings in exultation, not just for mating, or to find food, but in exultation.
I’m inviting you to listen, to sing, and in doing this, to find your voice. This wonderful man, so many years ago, helped me find my voice when it had been silenced for most of my life.
We are in extraordinary times, my friends, and we are all waking up. A lovely Israeli woman staying in my home for four days said she’s standing in the question now, wondering if the song she has been singing her whole life might belong to someone else – perhaps it’s time for her to find her own notes.
This life may at times feel like a nightmare we want to wake from, and that’s because we are literally in between worlds, the old world and the new world, and that liminal space sometimes feels disorienting.
It’s as if we are dying – and in that death of our old selves we must find our voices, our new song – a new way of moving through a new world we can all create together.
One note, one bar, one refrain at a time.
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Art by Fair Trade Frame of Mind by Duy Huynh
Essays like this appear in Freeing the Turkeys now available on Amazon