The Day the Music Died

My dad didn’t die. He was supposed to. I flew across half of our madly spinning space-rock to be with him, and he didn’t die. I packed up my notebooks of equations and cancelled my meetings in the dim offices of old men healthier than him to be by his side. But he didn’t follow through. Not the first time he hasn’t followed through. Not the first time I’ve dropped everything for him. It’s always his heart that doesn’t work right; that’s what puts him into the hospital, and what makes him stay out of my life.

My dad didn’t die. And so I have no idea what it is to grieve a father’s death. I have grieved his addiction, I have grieved his absence, but I have not grieved his passing. I got off the plane, jetlagged and a thousand euros poorer from the last-minute trip. I felt numb, trying to explain to the man at immigration why I was in Detroit. I didn’t know yet that my dad’s heart had started to work again while I was in the air. I didn’t know the music hadn’t died.

See, that’s the thing about him. My dad. His heart doesn’t work, but my god does that man make love to symphonies, embrace the curves of his violin, whisper sweet nothings to the classical masters. For every ounce of love that he withholds from me, he puts a magnum of wild, rushing adoration into that instrument. It overflows, it engulfs me, it overwhelms me, ever since my earliest days. With that adoration he gave our family life, provided us shelter, brought adventures to us. With that adoration he gave me the gift of passion and rhythm and the endless quest for the contradiction that is perfection in art. See, his heart doesn’t work, but his music – oh, his music – it works like the sun shines and the waves crash. The world can’t go on without it.

Up high in the clouds, disconnected from the truth, I grieved. I thought my dad’s heart stopped working once and for all; I thought he had died. And I didn’t grieve it. But in that same moment, when I thought the music had died, see, I grieved its passing.

So I do not know what it is to grieve a father’s death. I landed, and I learned that his heart – which the doctors say is bigger than normal, to all of our shock – had started to work again. I did not need to grieve that. But for one day, one transoceanic flight, I thought the music had died. And I know what it is to feel that loss.