Music and Memories: A Christmas Ghost Story

Advisory: I get sad on the holidays. Like a doom for breakfast kind of sad. I can get stuck in a frightening place that I don't know how to get out of until it finally just happens. This time I got unstuck by writing what follows. A lot of it is not very happy. Like in a lot of other Christmas stories (Die Hard, Bad Santa, The Bible), people die. There's only one picture. Of me. And some video. And people dying. Did I mention there is dying?

Merry Christmas.

The first time I experienced the death of a loved one was my grandmother, who passed in the middle of my 5th grade year. I experienced her death up close and personal alongside a roomful of my extended family by her bedside. As a way to experience such things, it was far from the worst. I spent a good deal of time with my grandparents as a child, so I was close with both of them. She was the first person to recognize any creative spark inside me, paying for lessons after watching me pick out Christmas carols by ear on their old foot-pump upright player piano. I stopped taking the lessons after a severe case of performance anxiety had me fleeing a recital in tears. I felt the first bitter taste of real guilt thinking about how I wasted that time and her money and spent even more time worrying about how disappointed she must have been. That's a wound that never had a chance to heal. The cancer eating her colon led to longer and more frequent hospital stays, and I saw her less and less, until one day my mom said she was coming home from the hospital and she was probably going to die. And then, as you know already, she did. When that happened, a strange combination of sorrow and relief that her pain was gone swept through me. And something else as well. I thought good, okay, this messed up time is over and things don't have to be crazy anymore and we can all get back to normal. But nothing felt normal after that.

It felt like my grandma dying was the last straw for my mom, at least when it came to my stepdad. I knew I didn't like him, I knew he wasn't kind to me, and that he and my mom fought. I knew that he had a temper. A particularly vivid memory I have of him losing that temper is one I can't help recall every time I hear the song "Silent Night". I begin all of this by talking about my grandma being sick and her death and how that felt because those feelings are all packed in there too, in one little song. I'll be dodging people lost in their own lives and memories so I can just get down the aisle with my cart and get that toilet paper when "Silent Night" will come on over the Walmart radio, and in my head I'm immediately in 5th grade, back at our duplex in West Seattle, the one with that Circle-K a block over where somebody got shot in a drive-by, the one just down from the crack house that caught fire on the corner. I'm sitting at the upright player piano that my grandma had moved to our house so I could practice, and I'm playing this version of Silent Night I just learned for my mom and my stepdad. For some reason my piano teacher picked an arrangement that I remember featured booming chords underlaying the melody, something kind of like Siiiileeent NiiiiightBOOM BOOM Hooooolyyy NiiiiightBOOM BOOM. In my head I see a young Beethoven hunched over the keyboard, his wild mane rippling as he pounds these chords out. I was probably just an inexperienced piano player stressing every beat as I played. Then there is more pounding directly behind and beneath me as the woman living in the basement hits her ceiling with her broom handle. I stop playing, stunned she isn't a fan. Then for some reason I'll never know since he never did anything before or since then to make me think he gave two shits about me, my stepdad pulls his six foot four frame off the couch, raises his scrawny leg with a scowl and stomps three quick times. This is immediately followed by the sound of muffled breaking glass as the light fixture drops from the ceiling below. What happens next is lost in time and the stress of the moment. It's a blur of adults rushing outside and younger children crying and some sort of understanding taking place between neighbors. And even though my grandma was still alive when this happened, the parts of my brain where this "Silent Night" memory live are connected to the parts that remember her dying because it seemed like right after she passed my mom left my stepdad and we moved in with my grandpa. And because this song is playing out of nowhere in the middle of my shopping it's all there, all of those memories and feelings overwhelming anything else that is going on around me, and all of a sudden I'm a mess, squeezing the Charmin absentmindedly and blocking the aisle for a woman who just wants to get these little shits out of here before she loses it for goodNO YOU CANNOT HAVE SPRAY CHEESE FOR BREAKFAST BRADLEY.

This is the power of music. I struggle with major depression, but I don't think it's harmful that I get lost in some pretty intense and depressing memories when I hear certain songs. I think it's worse to bury it. I want to learn from the pain in my life instead of hiding from it and letting it keep shaping me in damaging ways. If I try to hide from that pain it has a way of floating around my head in random little bits that can keep hurting me without me even knowing. Music lets me replay those memories and feelings until maybe they start to line up and I see themes emerge and maybe things start making a little more sense. Maybe.

Fast-forward to a year or so after we move in with my grandpa. 1990 I think it was. Life hadn't returned to normal as I had expected. Until then I'd been a model student. But 6th grade was different. It was middle school where I was one among hundreds. I also got my first pair of glasses.

I hadn't really been bullied before this, but I guess they smelled blood when I donned those giant Sally Jessie Raphael frames. I was the new kid and didn't have many friends, so I was an easy target. I was suddenly the nerd. I got moved from my regular homeroom to one that was supposed to be for more advanced students, but that didn't stop the talk about me being a pussy or my pants from being pulled down in front of my work group. It especially didn't stop them from calling me NARC for the rest of the year after I said something about it to our teacher. I felt alone for the first time in my life. Two of my bullies shared the bus stop I was supposed to use in the morning, so I always made my mom drive me even though I couldn't tell her the real reason why. Everything felt way too heavy and too much. I couldn't bring myself to put in the effort at school. I failed science. And I loved science. I'm pretty sure this was the beginning of the depression.

One day, a little 5th-wheel trailer showed up in my grandpa's driveway, and my cousin Michael started living there. I think he was 16 at the time, and he was pretty much the coolest guy a 6th-grader with self-esteem issues could hope to have move in to his driveway. He had dark, shoulder length hair, wore band t-shirts, and he smoked cigarettes (which I would later sample in the woods with kids from the neighborhood in an effort to look half as cool. I wasn't at the inhaling stage yet. I'm sure I looked great though.). Plus he lived in his own place. I remember sitting in the little dining area under his Led Zeppelin Icarus black-light poster and asking him about the scar above his eye. It was a little divot and a bump. He told me a girlfriend had been laying with her head on his lap and shot him with a bb gun, and it was lodged in there. Then he prodded it and moved it around. So badass. That was the only scar he ever told me about, but I know he had more than I could ever imagine. The life that gets you to the point where you are 16 and living in your grandfather's driveway has a way of leaving you with a few. I could tell there was something different and sad beneath the smile he always wore even if he never talked about those things. The music I heard him play in that trailer said enough. I don't remember a lot of what he played, mostly 80s metal à la Anthrax. But I came over one day and he popped in a tape and told me I had to listen. He pressed play and this is what I heard:

Then he did something that nobody had ever done before: he talked to me about the music. He talked about how the song is about a soldier who stepped on a landmine that destroyed his limbs, his face, his hearing, his sight, and his ability to speak. And there's nothing he can do but suffer in an existence where he can't communicate or experience anything like a life he knew before, so he just wants to die. I don't really remember my reaction to this, only the feeling. It made me want to listen again because it was so new and foreign to me, and so dark. I didn't know people expressed those kinds of thoughts and feelings in music. Until then it had pretty much been Nat King Cole, Perry Como, and Bing Crosby on my grandparent's record player and the oldies station in my mom's car on the way to school. I'd also heard other stuff he liked, and it was definitely different and heavy, but it didn't appeal to me or affect me in any way other than making me want to turn it down. But this was something different that demanded more of my attention. I was hearing something for the first time because somebody else loved it so much that they wanted me to hear it too and talk to me about how special it was to them.

Now, almost 30 years later, all it takes is hearing that gunfire and those helicopter blades fade in and those first four notes ring out and I'm 11, there with him in that trailer looking at the Master of Puppets poster on the opposite wall, the faint scent of puppy urine masked by the stronger artificial wildflower smell of carpet powder, and his hair is flying everywhere as he headbangs in the little walkway, and I can just enjoy that memory and that feeling and not even get a little ill when I think of Lars Ulrich's face. And then the neurons and synapses light up even more and include all the parts leading up to that moment, all the parts about my grandma being sick and dying, and my stepdad, and being lost in this new school, and being able to escape it all with my cousin and find a little peace, even for just a short time, by listening to this music. Because it's all connected in there, and those connections go further and deeper, and darker, right along with the song. They take me to a few months later when my grandpa takes us out for pizza and Michael and I pump quarter after quarter into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game so we can defeat Shredder, the final boss. We drive home and we are almost there when Michael tells grandpa to pull over. He jumps out, and my grandpa tells me not to look. But I see his dog's guts spilled out on the road. She had somehow escaped while we were gone. He gathers up her limp body and runs to his trailer. This is the last distinct memory I have of living with him. He left, to go somewhere, soon after. The memories skip ahead some years. They take me to my early twenties when I'm living in a shitty apartment facing an empty wheat field in Pullman, Washington and I get a call from my mom telling me my cousin shot himself. That's the part I can't dwell on for too long because it takes me to an ugly place that I don't like to visit. It makes me think of the life he lived that got him to that trailer and the experiences he must have had after he left. I think about young people growing up trying to resist those behind the destructive machines in our society. I think about how a lot of those young people don't make it. And then I think about how some of those young people grow up to either take control of the terrible machines themselves or entrust the keys to people who are just like the people they despised in their youth because somewhere along the line something broke. And I think all of these things while listening to a song because my cousin took the time to tell me that I could. But I can't dwell on those parts.

Instead I like to think of Christmas, 1998. I'd dropped out of college earlier in the year and was spending the holidays with some closer extended family. Depression was back again in a way that I hadn't experienced since middle school, but I was trying to make the best of it. I used to be better at that. But it gets exhausting trying to do that every year when the holidays come around and people expect joy and cheer and all I want is to stay home and not be forced to look happy for anyone else's sake. But that's what I was doing, because I don't want to ruin anyone's Christmas (too late if you've made it this far, sorry!). We were sitting around doing Christmas stuff and KNOCK KNOCK, the door opens, and it's my cousin Michael. Nobody was expecting him. I don't remember much about that day really other than his smile. He knew how to wear that thing in a way that made you think things were going to be okay.

That was the last time I saw him.

I'll be thinking of him this Christmas, and of others who aren't here because they couldn't bear the pain any longer. And I'll be thinking of happier Christmases spent with my grandparents, even though it's impossible to go back to that. The memories are there, but everything changes. I think more damage happens when we try to keep things the same in the face of a changing reality. I've spent too long wallowing in nostalgia, yearning for just a small drop of how the world feels when you don't know yet that everything sucks. I'm not going to find that feeling no matter how far I chase it, because it's not real and it never was, just like Santa (sorry kids!). When I put on certain songs I get taken to parts of my life where sorrow and loneliness live in conflict and harmony with those little bits of good stuff. I'm trying to embrace that feeling and accept all of it, because that's how life really is.

We are swimming in a lonely sea. There are so many of us, but the size of it is imaginable. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of another swimmer and try to catch up, but they are trying just as hard to catch up to someone else who is trying to get to that other swimmer just over the horizon. So all we can do is keep swimming. Or the alternative. But there are sometimes those rare moments when we find someone who has figured out how to build an island. You can climb on and rest, and maybe even forget about swimming altogether for awhile. Sometimes they will even teach you how to build your own island. That's where I am right now, or trying to be. I'm trying to build this island and send out a beacon to all the swimmers who can hear it. I want music blasting over the beach until people break out of the undertow, crawl up out of the struggle onto the sand, and dance.

I've been struggling with what that is going to look like, what that will mean, what it will take. I have big plans. And bigger doubts. Can I really do this? Am I good enough? Is this even important enough to waste all this time doing it? Once those voices start it's like a trapdoor opening under any creative energy I've managed to muster for the day. That's where I've been the past couple weeks, not knowing how to go forward, feeling things slipping away from me, not answering emails, neglecting my Tamagotchi. I realized I've been asking artists how music became an important part of their lives and not really trying to understand the fundamental forces behind this energy (and the doubt that goes along with it) driving me to go out to make pictures of people building islands to help themselves and rooms full of people forget about swimming for awhile.

This is the question I've been asking over and over again, listening through the 132 hours of music I have on various Spotify playlists, trying to get inspiration to go forward with this project. It's what I was doing last week, losing steam editing pictures and getting nowhere. Tuned out and not really listening at all. Then the helicopters...and those first four notes ring out, and the neurons fire and 30 years of ghosts and memories rush through me in a second. And when the closing section kicks in and James Hetfield sings about imprisoning darkness, I'm watching Michael swing his hair from the floor to the ceiling of that tiny trailer in glorious arcs, fighting his darkness the way he knew how. The song ends, and I think about what he would say to me if I could talk to him about these doubts that put me in my own darkness. I see him sit down across from me, elbows on his legs, his head hung low. He sits up and sweeps back the hair plastered with sweat across his forehead. He kicks one foot up on a stool, plucks his Marlboro from the ashtray and takes a drag, cheeks sinking into his face. He reaches down with his other hand to scratch his pup behind the ears. His lips pucker and he exhales a long stream of smoke.

He smiles.

This coming year I'm trying to keep perspective. I don't have to be a famous internet content creator putting out stuff every day to make a difference. I can keep working on this, I can do it, because I have been, and all it takes to make it happen is to not give up. That's how everything is made, by people not giving up. That's how my island is getting built. You don't need a huge staff of writers or a degree or any special skill to build one. Islands get started every day by young people just trying not to drown. On this holiday, when it feels like a good portion of the world is consumed with destroying itself, I wish you strength. You might feel powerless, but being able to stop the darkness, even temporarily, is one of the most powerful acts you can perform. Especially if you are sharing that power with someone else. You never know just how far into the darkness they'll push after you are gone. But most importantly I wish you the strength to not give up on whatever it is that keeps you going. Because you have to keep going. We need you.

#music #memory #art #christmas #death #suicide #depression