“An MP3 arrived by email, hours after Jack’s death. It came from Lin-Manuel Miranda, a new
arrival to the Public fold. It was
a demo recording of “It’s Quiet Uptown,” the song from “Hamilton” describing
Alexander Hamilton, and his wife, Eliza, as they grieve the death of their
19-year-old son, Philip:
‘There are moments
that the words don’t reach
There is suffering too
terrible to name
You hold your child as
tight as you can
And push away the
unimaginable
The moments when
you’re in so deep
It feels easier to
just swim down.’
“There
is nothing you can say,’ Mr. Miranda recalled thinking. “And yet, I had a song
about this. So I wrote to him saying, ‘If this is useful, then lean on it, and,
if not, delete this email.’”
“Mr.
Eustis and his wife found it useful. “Every line of ‘Quiet Uptown’ feels like
it’s exactly correct to my experience,” Mr. Eustis said. “It was the only music
we listened to for a long time, and we listened to it every day, and it became
a key thing for the two of us.”
Earlier
this fall my wife, Margot, and I had the sublime opportunity go to
“Hamilton”. We’d listened to the
recording beforehand to familiarize ourselves with the show. We remained unprepared, however, as “It’s
Quiet Uptown” and the performance surrounding it moved us to tears. Like Alexander Hamilton, like Oskar
Eustis, we have experienced “the suffering too terrible to name”, the death of
our son, William just after he turned 24.
We’ve had to “push away the unimaginable”, we know the just wanting to
“swim down.” I reacted the way
Oskar Eustis and his wife did, listening to the same music every day, listening
to it for a long time.
In the early afternoon of December 2nd, 2012, Margot,
our daughter Elizabeth Hope, and I were squeezed into a small hospital room
around the bedside of our son and brother William. We’d spent the prior six weeks at his bedside, hoping for a
miracle recovery; a brain deprived of oxygen after his heart had stopped
beating for too long. His
heartbeat was restored by EMS personnel. Over the course of those six weeks,
however, his damaged brain continued to wither. His heart labored on as other body systems began to suffer
from the stress they’d endured.
The end imminent, William was on morphine to guarantee he would suffer
no pain. The irony that a
morphine derivative, heroin, had initially caused William’s heart to stop
beating long enough to set off the sequence which would end with his imminent
death was not lost on us.
We held William, caressed him and kissed him until he left
us.
Moments later Elizabeth pulled
out her cell phone, laid it near William’s head and played a song.
We’d played lots of music for William
during those six weeks, especially anything by his favorite, Stevie Ray
Vaughn.
Sometimes we’d sung to
him, including “Happy Birthday” on November 18
th, toward the end of
the ordeal, as he turned 24. The song was new to me, Antony
and the Johnsons' “Thank You For Your Love.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Xdm5yS6PY
I heard it and asked Elizabeth who the artist was and if she would play it
again. When we arrived home I
found the song on You Tube and began playing it repeatedly. I explored a bit and came across
Antony’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will”. Instantly an old
favorite, Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” compelled me. I listened to it over and over
and over, lying in bed with my laptop, listening first to a gravelly Leonard
Cohen himself singing it, then testing the renditions of all the artists I
could find. Sampling them all to
distinguish comforting subtleties.
Listening obsessively, interrupted only by sporadic returns to “Thank
You For Your Love.” Ultimately
soothed by repetitions of K.D. Laing’s rich offering, my ritual continued in
the two weeks leading up to William’s memorial service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_NpxTWbovE
I have no memory of when the rite
tapered off. I do know that I come
back to the music when I need to, even finding something about the hateful
embrace of heroin in all of Cohen’s lyric, most especially: “…
love
is not a victory march. It's a
cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.”
Oskar Eustis’s description of his experience had, and has,
a visceral similarity. “For me, the
beautiful thing about ‘Quiet Uptown’ is, it serves a ritualistic function — it
takes us into the grief, and then it takes us out of it,” Mr. Eustis said. “And
there’s nothing, there’s no other ritual that I know of, that can do that for
me.”
For me the music takes me back to
that moment when hope for William flickered, even though I knew he was
gone. Death arrived before hope’s
exit. As Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote,
“We push away what we can never understand, we push away the unimaginable.”
Somehow the chance to say, “Thank you for your love,” the celebration inherent
in the word “Hallelujah” gets me into and out of, or at least a bit further
removed from, the grief that is always a part of me.
For four years now a prolonged six-week
anniversary of events darkens even more the fall season of gathering
darkness. This year the struggle
and the ritual have been heightened by Leonard Cohen’s death. “Hallelujah” has sprung forth from Kate
McKinnon, a children’s choir, Facebook posts in honor of Leonard Cohen. Is it quiet now where we live uptown on
New York’s Upper West Side? At the
least, perhaps calmed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s magnificently comprehending song
and an unknown, now discovered bond with Oskar Eustis.
This November 18th there will be a “Hallelujah”
for our lost boy/man, as Elizabeth, Margot, and I continue “working through the
unimaginable”, sorely missing our moment to sing “Happy Birthday” to William.
