I Awake: In Requiem

It’s been a month since that morning. A month since I was stirred awake by her kiss on my cheek, her hand braced on the round of my shoulder, voice wet with sorrow saying, I have sad news. This meant only one thing and at 53 years old, one expects mornings like this to come. The room was full of early morning light silhouetting her frame. I closed my eyes without reply and waited under the whir of the stirring fan. A list of names raced across my mind. Where will we need to travel and who will take care of things here for us? Do I have a suit to wear?

Chris Cornell died, she said.

The name derailed me, my train of thought. The words she spoke couldn’t be right—it wasn’t possible. This must be a bad dream; if I keep my eyes closed, I’ll tell her how real it all felt when I shuffle in later for some coffee. I listed away from the terrible force of those words: Chris Cornell died. I pulled the covers over my head to shield myself from it. My mind reeled. I felt as though I was falling down a deep, dark hole, the words like tumbling stones echoed from its walls.

When I came to: Chris Cornell died. The sun had drifted. My gut wrenching anguish told me I had not been dreaming. We held one another in silence and I moved through the house for hours unable to speak. No coffee, no food, nothing to fuel it. I digested reports a little at a time trying to find a grip in this strange terrain I’d awakened in. Somewhere in that fitful hole of sleep I’d imagined he had succumbed to the road, the torrential performing having taken its toll. It was an odd comfort. Reality quietly set in mid-sentence—mid-word—someplace I was reading, its weight pulling down my resistance. I surrendered weeping what felt like a thousand sorrows.

It’s been a month and I’ve only now been able to listen to more than a song without falling again into that darkness; a month seeking solace, stopping songs midstream, collapsing to tears and over again those tumbling stones, Chris Cornell died.

In 1989 I’d read a Robert Plant interview in which he noted he was currently listening to a band called Soundgarden. The endorsement held sway with me because Black Dog had permanently altered my young brain chemistry when it first hit the airwaves, changing the way I would engage rock ’n’ roll and the world at large thereafter. So, I purchased Louder Than Love as soon as I could find a copy in a northern Virginia supply chain.

Headphones donned, I slipped the disc into the tray, tapped it closed and pressed Random Play. It landed on number 8 and I Awake trudged onto my eardrums.

I was a 25 year old recently discharged Marine, a drunk grappling with sobriety, substance abuse and depression, slogging out of bed each day to a series of jobs leading nowhere, obliged by a failing marriage and a mortgage complete with its picket fence facade. It left me feeling more fraudulent than was sustainable. And this band Soundgarden somehow wrote a song about it. It exposed me and my feelings of disenfranchisement, self-loathing and self-destruction.

When the song faded away like a storm moving off into the distance, I pushed Pause on the player, staggered; my mouth agape, tears welled at the edges, fell away. I’d never been so profoundly affected by a song. I must have listened to it a dozen more times before taking in another track.

I Awake became my anthem.

I called my stepbrother, Gary, because I knew this record would resonate with him as well. This is what we’d done throughout our lives, propping one another up while negotiating life’s difficulties and bonding through music. We eagerly devoured Soundgarden’s short catalog.

1992 Lollapalooza presented our first chance to see them live. As we hiked the pavement of Lake Fairfax Park, Virginia, we had to make way for two vehicles approaching from the rear. When they came abreast, we saw that they were ferrying Chris, Ben, Matt & Kim toward the gates. We relished the fleeting encounter and delighted further in our chance to shout out our gratitude to the band, as they now stood aside the limos in a cordoned area at the gates, about thirty-feet opposite where we were all awaiting entry.

It was the same distance we had on the stage when they played. The sheer volume of their raucous set liquefied the audience, a sea of bodies surging and ebbing as a single moshing organism. The Christ-like Cornell hovering above, hair flowing, arms outstretched, his voice loud and clear as thunder with the sun bearing down and the sound of rapture in the air…It was an indelible performance.

Pearl Jam was on the bill that day which featured an unforgettable Temple of the Dog set. We grasped the rarity and wonder of what we had observed. It was a landmark event for us all: Gary, our high school best friend, Jimmy, my future wife and her young cousin, caught in the inescapable forces of Chris Cornell & Soundgarden.

There was the Superunkown show in 1994. We were married on the fourth of July, 1996 in honor of the Soundgarden song, Gary was best man. We celebrated by attending a Soundgarden show in the ’96 Lollapalooza tour.

In October that year Gary shot himself to death while I watched television in the adjacent living room. A month later a close friend died in a drunk-driving accident. A few months later, Soundgarden disbanded. My heartbreak seemed complete.

We followed Cornell’s solo career and bought Audioslave records. In 2012, Jimmy died in the throes of his addiction, possibly by suicide. An inordinate number of people I’ve cared for have tragically perished due to suicide, overdose, murder, accident or causes unclear.

The Higher Truth tour came through Richmond on June 22, 2016. He performed what felt like a thousand songs, songs I never thought I'd hear live again and songs unexpected. The stripped down acoustic arrangements underscored his gifts, the complexities of power and range in the man’s voice, his intellect and his heart.

It’s been just over a month since that morning. I received a print of a mixed medium portrait of Cornell that I’d ordered from the artist mourning his death in the Soundgarden Fans group. It’s a haunting, captivating depiction. The strokes of pencil and paint somehow reveal a pain now all too apparent. It reminds me of my own struggle and of all the struggles lost. It reminds me that depression, that incessant grief simmering beneath the image we present is an inescapable gravity always pulling on the mind, the bones.

The print reminds me of that last show and the lingering sense it left me about my great fortune to have been witness once again with my wife by my side; my fortune to be present, to be alive and able to celebrate in his presence one last time.

I never knew him personally but I knew him as most do through the certain kinship of his songs, through that ethereal expression of art entangling observer and artist in an uncanny sort of spooky action all its own—Alive in the superunknown?

At times, I find it irrational feeling such sadness for a perfect stranger. But my grief is not illusory, it’s very real. Perhaps I’m grieving for the Soundgarden songs that will never be or for the finality of a cherished long term relationship encapsulated now only in terms of its past; perhaps it’s grief for my uncertain journey with no spiritual signal on which to home. Alas, those beautiful songs of joy and hope wrapped in gloom and grit, songs turning sunlight on my darkness, forcing me to confront, to cope, and to fight, those songs remain difficult to hear, like suicide notes scoring the harsh realities of our loss.

I awaken each morning since May 18th with those same words reverberating in my head: Chris Cornell died. Each word striking deep wells of sorrow, drawing on reserves I didn’t know resided there. I wake up brokenhearted but I awake, I row and I try to live the day. Thank you, Chris.