"Take
this sinking boat and point it home."
That lyric from Glen Hansard's Falling
Slowly has been echoing in my head the last week.
Glen died suddenly, leaving behind songs
that quietly found their way into people's lives. Most of us never met him. We
didn't know what kind of breakfast he ate, whether he was messy or neat, or
what kind of friend he was. Yet his gift became part of our story.
It got me thinking about how strange
grief can be.
We mourn people we will never meet because
they gave us something we will never lose. A song, a book, a painting, a
performance or a laugh. They leave fingerprints on our lives without ever
shaking our hands.
When someone dies young, or at least long
before we expected, the loss feels even heavier. We don't just grieve who they
were. We grieve the songs they never wrote, the stories they never told, the
gifts they never had the chance to leave behind.
Fame isn't what we mourn.
We mourn the silence that follows a voice
that helped us make sense of our own lives.
Maybe that's why Hansard's lyric feels so
fitting now. His boat reached home. The rest of us are still steering ours,
carrying a little of his music with us along the way.
The first week of August is upon us. Both
baseball teams are playing well and the sun had a smile…
Happy Birthday Ceil...
