Music for Grief
Last week, the matriarch of my mother’s side of the family passed away. My grandmother, Betty Keuper, was 94 years old and goddammit she did things her way - even her passing. That particular story is rather personal to my family so I won’t share the details, but that fact serves to show you how much of a force of nature she was. Even though she was a soft spoken woman from The Greatest Generation, she was wicked stubborn and things were done her way. And frankly, everyone did things her way because she was right and it was fair. I wrote a Facebook post all about her personality and how her traits were passed on to her daughters. Usually when traits are passed from generation to generation, they lose their vibrancy, edges are softened, and are less potent. Not in the case of the Keuper/Cox Women. You see, my grandmother, while quiet and polite 99.9% of the time, had an iron will wrapped in yarn and she passed that along to her 3 daughters who embody those traits even more strongly. I have been called abrasive on more than one occasion. That’s because I’m Betty’s granddaughter and all those traits that were passed to me are even more potent than in my own mother. I’m proud to have those traits. I’m proud of being stubborn like Grammy. And I will be as fiercely loyal to my family as she was to hers. She was truly an incredible woman and her 3 daughters, 5 granddaughters, and 3 great granddaughters, as well as all the amazing men in our family, hope that we can live up to her legacy. We all hope we will make her proud.
The morning of her passing, I drove to my parents’ house to be with them. I rarely listen to music in the car - perhaps too many hours of listening to NPR as a kid made me prefer listening to people talking at me. But on that day, it didn’t feel right to put on a podcast. So, I decided to listen to music, but didn’t know what to listen to.
Classical music? I suppose I could listen to the great pieces typically associated with grief - “Nimrod” from The Enigma Variations or the Adagio for Strings. Or perhaps a piece that would make me, an atheist, imagine my grandmother’s soul ascending to heaven like Mahler 2 or Allegri’s Miserere.
Something in those choices felt so wrong to me. Almost as if I was being overly dramatic and begging for the attention of who knows who. Classical music just didn’t fit for me for that day.
So, I popped on Big Band Radio on Pandora and listened to some Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Glenn Miller.
This felt right. This felt like the way to musically grieve for Grammy. This sound world held me in its arms and let me grieve.
At her funeral service tomorrow, my brother and I will play “Moon River” and imagine my grandparents reunited like the two drifters in the song, going after the same rainbow’s end. I hope we will make her proud.