A friend died this week

and music helped with Mystery

My friend and I had plans to meet for supper tonight. Last evening, his partner called to tell us that they’d been in an auto accident. She was injured, but not seriously. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

We were going to meet at the rib place he’d taken us to in the spring, before the four of us competed as a team at a trivia fundraiser for a local community group. We placed third, and the gift certificate prizes are still under magnets on our fridge door.

I had the idea, from his partner chatting with mine, he had something he wanted to sound out with me. That happened sometimes. He was a pastor, and so am I, but I’ve got a couple of decades on him, and sometimes experience fills in when wisdom is sought.

I had the sense this time it wasn’t about work. I wish we could have got our fingers sticky with sauce tonight and drank some beer, and had that conversation. I look at his photo on the church website, and a small part of my brain, and a larger portion of my heart still expects he’ll tell me whatever it is needs talking about.

I grieve him, and the loss of that conversation, and others that could have been.

I led a graveside service this morning. I told myself to be all there, for the grieving widower and his family and friends, and I believe I was, mostly. But I turned down the invitation to go back to the daughter’s house for lunch, saying I had another family I needed to be with.

When I can’t accept an invitation, I often say I have another thing I need to do.

I don’t say it unless it’s true.

Today it was deeply, profoundly true, and the other family was my own. I needed to be home, with my wife. So I gave myself the rest of the day, to just be, and be home.

We talked some, and some more, about our friends. Compassion for her, and sadness for his death. And how it could happen to us, and how would the not-dead one go on, and who would they turn to, in that new and unwelcome alone-ness.

I lay on the day-bed in our three-season room this afternoon, with the breeze fluttering through the screen windows. I could still hear the birds, above the music from the bone-conduction headphones below my ears.

Two albums.

I so rarely just lay still and listen to albums.

Seven Psalms by Paul Simon, with some sweet harmony and lead vocals from Edie Brickell. This new one is a suite of songs, that seem to be the writer’s meditation on life, mortality, death, and the presence of God. I always thought he was a Gospel singer born into the body and life of a Jewish boy from Newark. These lines confirm it for me, especially when Edie sings them with Texas in her voice.

“Life is a meteor

Let your eyes roam

Heaven is beautiful

It’s almost like home

Children! get ready

It’s time to come home”

O Sun O Moon by Bruce Cockburn. There is no doubt in my heart, that Cockburn was writing about his hopes and dreams about life and death. Today, more than ever, I was grateful for his honesty, poetry, incredible musicality. He has been my favourite, since Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws.

There is so much on this album that reaches deep to the hurting and raw places in me.

Perhaps the most soothing and healing song for me this afternoon was the last one, which to my ear has a subtle New Orleans feel and flavour, including some gorgeous Dixieland clarinet. When You Arrive has a line about the city by the sea, and describes what might be Bruce revisiting his classic Festival of Friends vision of heaven, but this time it’s more like a Second Line.

“I said, the dead shall sing
To the living and the semi-alive
Bells will ring
When you arrive (One more time now)
The dead shall sing
To the living and the semi-alive
Bells will ring
When you arrive
When you arrive”