Little Engines of Connection
The name of the title is first to go / followed obediently by the title, the plot, / the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel / which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of…
—from “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins
Weeks from the official start of summer, my city has conveniently skipped what most would call spring. Times are strange: our winter jackets still hang near the door, just in case, and amid an unexpected burst of eighty and ninety-degree weather I heard someone say, “Valerie died twenty-one months ago…” Then they said it again. That someone it turns out was me, and I soon realized this instinctive, month-by-month measuring is not unlike how we track the growth of children before they reach age two. No one I know has ever introduced their toddler with a “she’s thirty months old,” nor would it be proper if I admitted that on May 12th, 2022, I celebrated my 555th month on this planet.
“Almost two years ago” will soon replace the early phrases on which I’ve relied, and it won’t be long before I’ll say “Valerie died two years ago,” and then “just over two years.” And during that time—particularly on the days when an appointment or a trip for groceries or simple exhaustion gets in the way of writing—I’ll continue to worry that the memories formed since Valerie died will confuse or erase what I remember from her life. There’s the danger too of even newer memories replacing those. It’s as though my brain keeps getting bumped and the needle that traces the record of our days skips yet another season. Weeks become the months that become the years and, all the while, death is growing up.
Near the midpoint of Rosalie Lightning, an illustrated memoir exploring the loss of his two-year-old daughter, Tom Hart writes: “I am beginning to collect stories of dead children.” My own assortment of stories—not mine exactly, but those of widowed parents raising children—has likewise begun to grow… There’s Carolyn, the foster mom to the dog the kids and I adopted in December, who lost her husband when her children were seven, six, and three… There’s the poet, a friend of a friend whose husband (and father of their sixteen-year-old daughter) was killed by a dump truck that, driverless, rolled into their yard from a nearby gas station… There are the parents among the support groups of widows and widowers I’ve met virtually—squares on an otherwise black screen—every other Tuesday night over a period of months… And there’s Samantha, mother of two children, the widow of a friend who died in March and with whom I exchange emails so that we might offer mutual support from inside this strange, unexpected “club,” all of us moving invisibly through the day-to-day essentials of tying shoes or making lunches or trying to hold our children a little tighter and with twice the love.
These stories arrive—with or without invitation—from the concrete world, just as they do when, say, I’m reading a poem or watching movies. The experts will insist that smell triggers our oldest, most vivid memories. In my experience—that singular, undoubtedly biased frame of reference—I’m pulled more frequently into the past when I listen to music. The songs we listened to as adolescents—our “formative years”—are powerful in this respect. I’m especially intrigued when a song makes a late entrance and defines a period of months or years long after we’ve left our youth (often with our idealism), and as though I haven’t amassed enough “stuff” as an adult, it seems I’m now collecting music that awakens and shapes my memories of Valerie’s life, her illness, and her death.
Anyone close to Valerie knew her fierce, everlasting love for one musician in particular, and although we married with no prenuptial agreement, I made it clear that Valerie would have my full understanding if she ever left me for David Bowie. Our kitchen, in fact, featured a “David Bowie Wall”—paintings, postcards, presents from friends—and we’ve eaten countless pancakes and blown out many candles with the blessing of his watchful eyes. So it comes as no surprise the very mention of his name or a string of notes from any Bowie song—“Ashes to Ashes,” his collaboration on “Under Pressure,” Seu Jorge’s covers (in Portuguese) from The Life Aquatic soundtrack—sparks the neurons that reawaken any number of moments with Valerie.
And there’s that Saturday afternoon, no one yet wearing masks, when I walked behind an orderly: he’s pushing Valerie in a wheelchair (not too fast and not too slow) down hallways, in and out of elevators, and toward a large room that houses a sleek and rather cold machine. While the technicians scan Valerie’s body and I wait in the lone plastic chair kept outside for that purpose, the orderly—hoping the 49ers with dominate the Vikings in the playoffs—asks if I know the score of the game. Since football, like Pluto, sleeps among all that orbits farthest from the center of my thoughts, I’m startled that I remember these details. Then again, the orderly already left a subtle, affecting impression by singing Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as our small caravan navigated the maze of the hospital.
“Don’t worry,” he begins now on our return, “about a thing…” His timing of each phrase is perfect and he continues so softly you might miss the comforting spirit of the song: “‘Cause every little thing… gonna be alright.”
But much of my expanding playlist rises from those songs discovered or rediscovered since Valerie’s death. There, at the end of that first summer, circling after the kids and later floating alone in the inflatable pool we purchased to better cope with the pandemic, I hear the repetition of consonants—the w’s and h’s—in the early parts of “Helplessly Hoping” as it drifts across the yard from our portable speaker:
Wordlessly watching, he waits by the window and wonders / At the empty place inside / Heartlessly helping himself to her bad dreams, he worries / Did he hear goodbye?
Months later, I add “Heaven” to the library when I sing with David Byrne, at least a dozen times, while driving through the occasional shadows left by the clouds on the rolling landscape of Wyoming. Now and again we sing together still: “Everyone is trying… to get to the bar… The name of the bar… the bar is called Heaven.” These songs and others—not to mention an entire album—follow me where I stumble or appear to move steadily into the next season.
Sometimes, let’s be honest, the music wanders elsewhere, for returning now is the memory of Valerie singing on the first day of August, five days after learning that the cancer has spread and, without intervention, will continue spreading. This time, as our family has done many summers in the past, we’re driving toward the ocean. Valerie and I have already laughed at the dark possibilities of a Make-A-Wish Foundation for adults—Valerie quips that most wishes would be sexual—and we’ve already joked about the RV Hall of Fame & Museum. Or maybe this comes later… What’s important is the narrowing of that afternoon when the passing trees seem to pause, the stormy weather takes a breath, and Valerie joins whatever song is playing on the radio. Her voice is beautiful and, for a mile or maybe two, soothes our uncertainty about the months ahead. How ordinary such a moment might otherwise be except, as you might’ve guessed, it’s the last time I’ll hear her sing.
When Valerie dies, eight days later, the words she sang have already slipped away. No vague recollection of a melody and there’s not a single harmony, chord, or lyric. I wonder what detail, crucial or inconsequential, stopped by to say hello and distracted my attention from that music. I wonder if Valerie might remember if she could somehow walk into the room. A friend or perhaps someone in our family—that detail has vanished as well—assured me this memory would return and yet, twenty-one months later, I haven’t heard a thing.
If the pandemic had permitted a funeral in August 2020, we would’ve chosen music important to Valerie and, no doubt, meaningful to the occasion. And if the pandemic had permitted a funeral, I imagine some in attendance would attach significance to the weather: if pulsing with birds and sunshine, we’d note how the day captured the energy and spirit of Valerie’s life; if that same day turned molasses with heavy skies, we’d suggest that the puddles mirror the emotion in our hearts and the weight of Valerie’s absence. It’s part of our wiring, this readiness to find stories—those little engines of connection—that help us understand the world. And while some of these stories stand at our doorstep as if for the first time, others feel timeless, as though waiting for us on a dusty shelf or shared around a fire when the very first stories were told.
In this story, the one I’m sharing with you here, I’m obliged to reveal the song that levels me like no other. While living and working in England during the 1960s, a young musician named Paul Simon spent the night with a friend. At dawn, after untangling their bodies, she recited a version of “Cuckoo,” a nursery rhyme that begins: “In April come he will. In May he sings all day…”
It appears little else is known about the woman. What we do know is that the morning left an impression on Simon, so much so that he used the words she recited as inspiration for “April Come She Will,” recorded in 1965 and released early the next year on Sound of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel’s second studio album. The song—presumably like the affair—is brief, less than two minutes long, and features Simon on guitar while Art Garfunkel delivers the lyrics. There’s a natural, chronological progression in the three verses, and Garfunkel stretches the names of each month so that their syllables better match the phrasing that completes each line:
April, come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stay
Resting in my arms again
June, she’ll change her tune
In restless walks, she’ll prowl the night
July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight
August, die she must
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold
September, I’ll remember
A love once new has now grown old
For me, the opening lines deliver that first spring: Valerie and I are still a new couple in April and May, and the length of our “honeymoon period”—a full cup from the well of thrill and desire—takes us both by surprise. When June arrives and the mood of the song shifts, I locate a parallel memory: it’s early summer and a decade later, several months yet before any diagnosis, but a string of symptoms tell Valerie that something is wrong. And when the lyrics tumble inevitably into July, four years have passed and we’ve just received results from Valerie’s final scan.
Listening to the closing lines, I sometimes wonder if the speaker (the “I” in “I’ll remember”) is reflecting on the relationship as a whole (everything before this penultimate line) or if the speaker merely remembers what follows at the end of the song. Without punctuation, aside from a few commas, we could argue one or the other. It could be both or maybe it doesn’t matter. We each listen with our own biography, our own frame of reference and, knowing this, I have to acknowledge that “April Come She Will” punches me so squarely in the chest because of a single, key coincidence: like the unnamed, rather ambiguous “she” of the song, Valerie died in August.
Paul Simon penned these lyrics more than a dozen years before Valerie’s birth. They’re more than likely linked to that short-lived relationship, and let’s not forget that that “she” was a “he” in the original nursery rhyme. Seeing the songwriter’s words on the page, I’m even able to reason that “die she must” is symbolic, citing specifically how the final line describes a love that (very much in the present tense) “has now grown old.” But like the lyrics of so many popular songs, the lyrics of “April Come She Will” are ambiguous: there isn’t the name of a bar or a restaurant, no sunrise walk along the River Thames… On one hand, specific detail lays claim to our stories and makes our lives uniquely our own. On the other hand, songs without this kind of detail offer an invitation that we can accept by attaching our own experiences. Sometimes, more often for me than before, these songs turn us into a weeping mess.
That possibility, that mysterious power, is central to what I love about art. Our responses can leave us empowered or feeling vulnerable, yet I believe that everyone—day after day or only occasionally—has the capacity to make these connections. It can be as simple as walking into a museum, opening a book to its first page, or putting aside everything to remind ourselves this world is wide, heartbreaking at times, and often miraculous. It’s why I tune one ear for the first notes of whatever song is about to play and the other—right here—listening for the barking dog, the airplanes overhead, or the cardinals on the branch, now newly green. I do my best to carry this music, to believe that these sparkling details will carry us when we need them most.
And when I remember Valerie singing, I know she believes this too.