Ivy recommends “Almost Home” by Mary Chapin Carpenter
Ironically, we are almost home when it comes on the car radio, from an iPod Classic played on shuffle. We have just been discussing death and burial, in an abstract sense, which I suppose is why my father says it. "I want this song to be played at my funeral."
I bite my lip in the backseat. My mother has the kind of terrible memory that makes it into a running family joke, and I cannot know for certain she will outlive him anyway, so I mark this in my brain as something I have to remember even as I have a sense-premonition that I will never be able to hear this song again without thinking of it.
It's months, not years, later that he is diagnosed with the chronic autoimmune lung condition, the thing that has been sapping his energy and his colour, perhaps after all the thing that made him think of his own funeral. I know all the medical details, partly because I have to and partly to keep up with my mother's anxiety, deliberately not broadcast to me but leaking around the edges anyway, and I use the facts to patch up her cracks.
He is treated. The condition stabilises.
I have no idea whether either of my parents remember what my father said. I cannot bring myself to ask - I'm uncertain whether it's because I don't want to bring to them the associations I have, or whether I don't want them to know I still remember.
Mary Chapin Carpenter has always been one of my father's musicians to me, like Joan Baez and Nina Simone. There were a handful of songs I knew well, listened to independently: 'He Thinks He'll Keep Her', 'Down At The Twist And Shout', 'I Feel Lucky'. Exclusively the cheerful ones. It's not until the year after the diagnosis I start listening to her in earnest. I make a playlist of her songs. After some hesitation, I put 'Almost Home' on it.
I like the song. I cannot listen to it without thinking of my father's funeral, but I will not let that stop me from liking the song.
It is 2022. My dog dies, my grandfather dies, I see grief up close and personal in the dozens. I suppose I experience it, in my own strange way. I'm not certain what it is people call grief from the inside, I just know I'll always be the kid who makes it their duty to remember which songs their father wants played at his funeral and refuses to let it stop them from liking the songs anyway.
In the first days of 2023, we drive home from the first family Christmas spent without my grandfather. We're hours from home when it plays this time, in the middle of a half-empty or half-full highway with miles to go. I still don't know whether anyone else in this car remembers, but my mother leans her head back and my father, driving, smiles and taps his fingers against the wheel as I sing along. There's no such thing as no regrets, and for the rest of my life, before or after my father's death, I believe this song will be earmarked in my head, page bent over with a scribbled annotation of loved ones' mortality. But, baby, that's alright.
Ivy Waters is actually three writers stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat. They spend most of their time hunched over their vinyl collection tittering in delight. Occasionally, they tweet @IvyandM.
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