For All of Us

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and I’m in the kitchen, pulling my apron from the drawer, when my husband says,

Did you read about Jackson Browne’s son?

No.

He died.

Oh no. What happened?

It just says they found his body, maybe suicide.

Oh, God.

After that, I bang about the kitchen, chop vegetables and roll out pie dough, and I keep thinking about Jackson Browne. Browne the parent more than the musician, even though as an artist he holds a credit in my biography, his music the soundtrack to my tender youth. His songs, whenever and wherever I might hear them, snag me and throw me back to the depths of all that emotion.

While Doctor my Eyes may have been his break out hit along with others like Running on Empty and later Somebody’s Baby, and so many more, its the melodies and lyrics of These Days, Late for the Sky and For a Dancer that permeate me as if Browne has crawled into my skin.

In For a Dancer, with a pleading tenor, he sings what we all understand, no matter our faith, because belief has its limits, when he says he does not know what happens when people die. He then gives us a metaphor for how this misery resides in us, like a song I can hear playing right in my ear that I can’t sing. I can’t help listening.

So as I continue my meal prep, For a Dancer, plays in my ear, and I think how this question must come in earnest to Browne now. And once again, during the holidays, I attempt to reconcile the pain of this famous man spilled into other sadnesses, like the young National Guards who were shot, like that of my also young friend who recently learned of the tumor on his spine.

And yet it is Thanksgiving, a celebration that builds into the supposed happiest time of the year.

And yet, this song keeps playing in my ear.

Every year, it seems, when the expectation is merriment, I struggle with this parallel of joy alongside pain, of gratitude amidst loss.

Browne, though, in the song, speaks to the unanswerable with, Crying just ain’t gonna ease you down. And he cautions against the very thing that torments me….Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around. Go on and make a joyful sound.

Later, in 1976, the same year his wife, Phyllis Major, died by suicide, The Pretender was released, and the title song is more conversation about the big questions, more inquiry into the push and pull of this life. Yet it feels more personal than For a Dancer that is a song for all of us, is one true stanza after another, and in its melancholy holds a hope. For those of you so inclined, I suggest you give it a listen. You’ll be reminded of how gorgeous it is, but if you’re like me, or even tragically like Browne, you’ll be consoled, if in this time of Thanksgiving, you need to be.