grief music and the last photograph
First published on Liz’s Substack
I wonder if Nick Cave ever gets tired of people telling him about the most miserable and painful aspects of their lives on the red hand files? After Jessie died I listened to only a handful of voices. Nick Cave, Adrianne Lenker and Lisa O’Neill. I went to see Lisa O’Neill play at the Barbican just before Christmas and wept easily throughout the whole thing. I sang her version of the Galway Shawl at my sister’s funeral, the priest kissed me on both cheeks after.
Now that I’ve been spat out of the mouth of winter those voices are too loaded to listen to day-to-day. When I say spat out I mean that if life is going to keep sweeping me along I may as well try build a boat, which usually means going to London, which means headphones. Nothing has interested me musically (except my own work, more on that later) I’ve also not been seeking anything out. I feel mostly too over sensitive to tolerate being surprised, so I’ve not listened to the radio in the car or when I’m cooking, not wanting any sort of erratic company. Earlier this week I was in London (on a boat building exercise) walking from Marylebone to Mayfair, I decided to let the algorithm choose what I should listen to for the first time in a long time and it told me I’d like the new Viagra Boys album. I hate the algorithm most when it gets things right. The Viagra boys are so silly it’s profound.
Anyway what am I doing here on substack? What do we gain by sharing our grief? Why do I feel the need to share mine with you? The way I see it is if I can’t be happy I may as well be interested. Whether or not that is interesting remains to be seen. Grief is surely more universal than any other human thing and something we as people are so shit at talking about. At some point along the way it occurred to me there will have been a last photograph of my sister. I take a lot of film photographs of my family, mostly of my sisters children. I recently finished a roll of film that I had started before Jessie died. I took it to the developers harbouring a giant hope that there might be a photo or two of Jessie on there. In the end there was only one. It was a photo of her writing one of her daughter’s names in the sand with shells whilst we were on a holiday last year, head down, absorbed in the task. Chronologically not the last photograph but for it to appear and be novel in a time of pouring over photographs, most of them familiar family staples, it is precious.
All of this is just to begin to say I want to talk to you, so I’m going to.
