Throwback Thursday - Bridge Over Troubled Water

This was originally posted on my Tumblr on July 6, 2012. 

Working on this technology now.

Bridge Over Troubled Water - Parental Nightmares

If you dig back into my music posts, you’ll know the original intent of my music blog was to talk about how music affected me. I haven’t written about that in a long while, but here goes.

The obvious nightmare scenario for any parent is losing a child. You don’t really need to be a parent to know and understand that. Ultimately, it’s a selfish thing too, because it’s about dealing with your own grief more than anything else, and I don’t say that to diminish it any way. It’s obvious because it is the ultimate nightmare scenario. But the other parental nightmare scenario, the one that isn’t as obvious and no one really talks about is not being there for your children. This one is harder to understand unless you actually are a parent, I think. And maybe even harder to understand if you haven’t lost your own parents yet. But, this is the nightmare that haunts me and it’s tied to a song now. 

It was probably some time last year that I heard Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” for the first time in a long time. I don’t think I’d heard it since my daughter was born. But on that day, it was fresh after having a very vivid, sad and disturbing dream in which I had died but was a ghost and watched my daughter grieve me (yeah, I’m disturbed like that) so the song took on a new meaning. I was choked up from the opening note and by the last verse “Sail on silver girl, sail on by, your time has come to shine, all your dreams are on their way,” I was close to needing to pull over. “I’m sailing right behind” just killed me. So now, whenever I hear the song it gets me, hard.

I don’t believe in life after death or anything like that. I accept the beauty of having only one chance at life and making the best of each moment. But the sadness of the permanence of death still haunts me. As I get older my own mortality becomes more prominent in my mind and the fact that I would not only miss being there for my daughter, but miss watching her grow is a heart breaker. Not that I spend time obsessing over this, but certainly, this song now brings it up. It’s sad, but it’s also, as grief usually is, comforting to know that I am capable of love on this level. Time and again, music is responsible for these realizations and these emotional journeys, for me. Anyway, the next music post won’t be so melancholy.