I walk into a coffee shop. The song “Rocket Man” by Elton John is playing. Since coming back from LA, I’ve heard so many songs that seemed as though somehow, they were programmed with intention, broadcast on her frequency. Even as I write this, “Country Roads” is playing: “The radio reminds me of my home far away / Driving down the road I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday, yesterday.” Just minutes ago I was driven to tears by some Grateful Dead song, crying into my tacos and thinking maybe people would just suppose it was the jalapeños. “My my, hey hey / Rock and roll is here to stay / It’s better to burn out, than to fade away,” croons Neil. That’s the thing: She is here to stay. And this is how I know: it’s the music. Almost every song I hear, it’s like she wanted me to hear it. And then I think, “Of course there are no coincidences.” Funny enough, “Bennie and the Jets” comes on right then, a song I knew was her least favorite Elton John song (and, perhaps due to having had to play it hundreds of times as an occupational hazard, is mine too). But even here, I laugh on the inside. She loved Elton John.
I knew that she would have enjoyed those tacos. She would have sat at that table with me. We would have talked about anything. But she couldn’t be there. Not in person, anyway. I could feel her though—like I’ve been feeling her even since I got the call from my sister early Saturday morning.
“Just slip out the back, Jack / make a new plan, Stan / you don’t need a decoy, Roy / just listen to me.”
Yeah, she’s right here with me—she has been the whole time. That’s why I don’t feel a hole, or an emptiness. Sure, I miss her laugh, her smile, all of those things that made her so incredibly memorable. But she’s with me everywhere I go.
“Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be / There will be an answer, let it be.”
I remember once she cried during this song. She always got it, the emotion of a good song. That’s why she must be behind this playlist. I mean, now it’s Stevie Wonder, “Signed, Sealed Delivered.” Come on.
I can’t even keep up. It was Joni Mitchell earlier—“Paved paradise, put up a parking light / With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swingin’ hotspot / Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone…”
Now it’s Reelin’ in the Years, probably her favorite Steely Dan song—though she had many. Is it a coincidence that every one of these songs was put on a list last night to be played at her memorial service?
I’m sure I could sit here all day like this. I could go somewhere else. I could finish up my taxes for the looming deadline. I could take a drive, go to the gym, make some calls… and she’ll be right there with me.
“I’m a picker, I’m a grinner, I’m a lover, and I’m a sinner…”
I can hear her sometimes through the music. She’s speaking to me, saying, “Fly! Go for it! I believe in you.”
The last song was “The Boxer” and now it’s “American Pie”. I’m just sitting here struggling to wrap this up. But I’m not in the mood to finalize anything. I think she’s trying to show me that there’s nothing really “final”… that there’s always another song, another day, another chance.
If she met the CEO of one of those pipeline companies that she spent that last twenty years of her life fighting against, and heard him tell his story, she would probably hug him and say, “Just try not to be so selfish, okay?” That thought kind of makes me laugh, but it makes me cry, too.
“Bye, bye, miss American Pie…”
This won’t be the day that I die. I still have a lot of work to do.
This writing is among the first of many that are and will be inspired by and dedicated to the memory of my beloved mother, April Pierson-Keating, 1967 – 2019.