I wrote a new song, centered around a character’s experience of grief.
At the beginning, the song came together pretty well. I developed an alternate tuning for my acoustic, which encouraged chords—and, more important, a mood—that I might not otherwise have discovered. (The Elder heard me practicing it and proclaimed it “good,” so I might be on the right track.) I wrote some lyrics that, through setting and action, evoked a sense of the emptiness of loss.
I struggled, however, to develop the character’s thoughts, to capture his mental response or attitude toward a hollowed out world. I had few ideas, and the ones I did have were simply cliché.
It doesn’t help that I don’t grieve much. Even for the greatest loss that I’ve experienced in my life, when my father died from complications around cancer surgery, I didn’t experience much more than sadness—deeper than other sadness, of course, but surprisingly fleeting. I certainly wouldn’t call it grief: that seems to me to be a longer road—or, worse, it’s the recognition that there is a long road ahead, perhaps heightened with a fear that the road will go on forever.
I’m not saying I can’t imagine myself feeling grief, especially now that I have kids. But I wouldn’t say that I’ve experienced it yet. I don’t deny its power, but I don’t really know what it is.
I suspect that’s part of the reason I leaned into the issue when the song started moving in that direction.
So: I turned to the Internet. I figured I’d find blogs written by people chronicling their grief, or by counselors describing their experiences working with those stricken with grief. I expected that it would probably take awhile just to find the posts, let alone process them. But it would be better than just spinning my tires and churning out more annoying clichés.
Fortunately, I found this poignant, painful resource: “A Survey of Grief Experiences: Study Details.” It’s a “rich and searchable corpus of grief experiences,” the responses to a questionnaire that was part of a study at the University of York. In all, 265 people answered 21 questions about their experience with grief. (The context, process, questions, methodology, etc., are all laid out on the site.) Their answers are presented in full (edited lightly to keep them anonymous, of course). It is as beautiful as it is heart-breaking.
Of course, I wasn’t looking for things I could quote; I was looking for patterns that might spark new ideas for me. And, while there are some patterns, there were fewer than I expected. Grief, it seems, is a highly individual experience.
I’ve finished the song—at least for now—but I think it will take some time to record. I’m struggling to get through the guitar part; I’ve never been good at finger picking, and the odd tuning forces my left hand into unusual shapes. Lots of buzzes and unintentionally muted notes. But I’m improving, however slowly.
And if all goes well, the song—called (for now) “Footsteps in the Hall”—will be one of the more recent songs on that album I’ve been working on.
Top illustration cropped from the York Grief Study’s website.