Keening

image by Anders Marlowe

This guest post is by Claire Laura. She is the mother of two babies: one who lives on earth and one who is gone. She works as an archivist and writes in her spare time.

When I think of your music, of the music that connects me to you, I think of the word from Old Irish, to keen, to lament loudly over the dead. There is a part of me that’s always keening for you. And that part longs to sing — to sing, as if you were still alive, as if you needed me to sing you to sleep, to sing you awake, to comfort you with my voice.

On March 7th 2024, I listened to metal music . I was in the car on the way home from the second day of the three day dilation and evacuation procedure, the day they stopped your heart. This helped some, but it was so fierce and angry, I needed something to calm me, and played Trouble by Cat Stevens. Then I cried and cried and cried. If I wasn’t already crying, the music helped me to cry, and if I was crying, it helped me to cry more. I was grateful for this, but later that evening and over the next week, month, year, I realized my relationship to music had changed, just like all my relationships did after losing you.

The songs I had previously thought of as sad were not sad enough. The songs which weren’t sad were unbearable. For a while I listened to very little music. But then, slowly, I began curating a list of acceptable songs that I could listen to, and these I listened to on repeat, because they were your songs, the ones I would sing to you, I did sing to you, to your not being with me. I could play them in my earbuds at work, on the way to work, on the bus, in the grocery store, and then, I’d be more with you, keening, not happier, but closer.

Let me tell you about three of your songs. In December 2023, before I lost you, I watched a movie that starred Dan Levy, simply because it had Dan Levy in it. At the start of the movie, the characters sing a song, Everyday Will Be Like A Holiday by William Bell.

This scene of everyone singing was the best part of the movie to me, and it made a lasting impression. I remembered it again, after you died.  “Everyday will be like a holiday/ when my baby comes home”.

This song is filled with horns, bells, and is joyous. This song lifts the spirits, and promises something to come, a longed for togetherness. I sing it to you all the time, this song, and in singing it, I come home to you, to the part of me that longs for you, that keens for you, and to the part of me that holds you still, as I once did, as I always will.

In May 2024, when I finally took time off of work after you died, it felt like an odd holiday of sorts, a holiday for grief, and I played this song, and sang it, and looked for ways to come home to you, taking my body to the woods, to the ocean, crying, raging, painting while crying, raging while walking. Everyday!!!!

On March 8th, 2024, my mother stood over me while I lay in bed, my body a ruin without you in it, your body, with your heart stopped, your body, without your life in it, waiting to go to the crematorium, somewhere at the hospital, far from me. She was thinking of a song, she said, and she wondered if she could sing it to me. I nodded and she began singing a version of Skye Boat Song.  When she sang the lines, “Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar, / Thunderclaps rend the air,” I began crying, and cried all the way through the song. I asked her to sing it again, I asked her to play it on the piano for me, I asked her to sing it together with my grandmother over the phone to me, and the song lay on me like a blanket. The song let me imagine you— you sailing across some sea, to the sky above, where I couldn’t follow, but where I knew you’d be safe. Even though I howled like the wind to lose you, even though the air was rent with my keening, with the storm of your loss, you were on your way, on some bonnie boat, speeding like a bird on the wing.

One day in November, months and months later, when I was pregnant with your sister, I went to the ocean on my lunch break. The tide was high and the wind whipped the waves into cascading spirals reaching for me. I sat on a log near the water’s edge, looking at the mountains across the water, what they call the Sea-to-Sky Highway, and I cried loudly, lamenting, keening. One of your special places is on that Highway, a place we went to when you were still with us, but when we knew you’d have to go. A waterfall. I felt the winds carrying you away, I felt that waterfall tumbling down toward the sea. Yes, this song is very important to me, and I love to sing it to you.

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s version of the song, a line goes, “Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, / Say, could that lad be I?” I love to sing that line, to hold in my heart the wish that I could have gone instead of you, somehow, that I could have taken the loss for the both of us, and that you would no longer be gone.

There is an even older song that is yours. This song is called Riddle Song. This too, my mother asked if she could sing to me, having been reminded of it, watching me in my grief for you. This song asks a riddle, and answers it. A cherry when it’s blooming has no stone, a baby, when it’s sleeping, has no crying. The medical words for your death are so bleak and clinical, interrupted, terminated, evacuated. This song captured another language for your loss, one of imagery— a cherry when it’s blooming, a chicken when it’s pippin, a magic particular to you and babies like you, beautiful as cherry blossoms, loved in an endless, infinite way. I like to think of the baby in the song, who is only sleeping, but makes me think of you, and all the other babies like you, who were quiet for another reason, having left this world, with no crying. “When I say I love you, it has no end. “

What songs have you grieved with? What songs do you sing to your babies, that bring you closer, together with them?