The Ferocious Music Of Living

A Requiem For a Friend.

Mostly there are the regular mornings. The days we wake to our little human things; grab something for breakfast, take ten or fifteen minutes to read the paper, drive here and there, call a friend —and perhaps, share a laugh before getting on to the next chore. And finally, as the sun begins to set, sit down to dinner, and soon after, head off to sleep before it all begins again.

But there are also days like this one, days when all our habits, all our rote, ritualized, unnoticed behaviors are suddenly caught in the act, as it were, suddenly seen for all their normal-ness. Noticing is itself a way of bringing one to a kind of attention that isn’t experienced on so-called normal days. This morning, as I sat buckled in my seat on a flight home from Seattle, I got a call from my wife. Since we’d only spoken an hour before and said our “see-you-soons,” I already knew what she was going to tell me. Our friend had died.

Ida, a single mother, an internationally renowned violinist, a brilliant and strong-willed woman, had been treated for leukemia, put into remission, (miraculously, given the severity of her illness) and then only a month later, struck with a powerful and ultimately fatal recurrence. Her ten-year-old son, a precocious and singularly intelligent boy, is now officially an orphan. So, yes, the rhythm of this particular day is not normal, it is a rhythm rarely heard or felt. The small group of people that have received the news by email or text is already moving to the strange new pulse, their calm, their sense of security pulled out from under them.

As I sit on the plane and look around at the passengers—the two brothers, fourteen and ten from somewhere in the Midwest, laughing at a video game and drinking their cherry Cokes, the woman who boarded the flight with a cane and looks too young and too vital for one, the tall blonde flight attendant with her incandescent smile—I can’t help thinking about intention. Where am I going? Home of course, but beyond that what is my trajectory, my overarching purpose for being here? And the new rhythm is pushing me; I can feel it urging me toward those questions.

Even as Ida’s body lies somewhere in Los Angeles, waiting to be put in the ground, waiting for prayers that can only be said after her interment, she is the composer of this rhythm. She is a musician after all, and no stranger to creating pulse and momentum. Her music is still alive, still rushing out in a whirl of time and tempo. And now, even at five miles off the ground, I feel her music, I hear it. It’s telling me to come quick, telling me that the orchestra is onstage, that the audience is seated, that the conductor has raised his baton, that he’s readying the orchestra to perform the ferocious music of living.

Intention is not something I think about often. Most days it goes unattended. Intention is a symphony that reverberates in endless waves of questions. Why are we here, what are we accomplishing with our short time, and who are we serving? And on a day like today when the curtains are pulled back we can deduce, or more correctly, we are reminded that even though we rarely embrace it, our intention is in fact, always clear, always simple—even as we try to avoid it. 

As I look down at the ceiling of clouds, it’s as if I had died, and was looking down upon my entire life. This causes me to smile. My smile is both sad and full of pity for how confused I make things. Today, moving in this new way, to this new pulse, finding my intention is easy. ‘Heal all wounds’, it says. ‘Bring hope, build bridges, defend the weak… feed the poor; sow only light and never darkness.’ 

Also this: Come to know, to truly know, that your time spent on Earth is fleeting. And within that awareness, come each day to hear your clock ticking, to see the sands of your hourglass slipping away. Far from being morbid, this constant reflection is how I will learn to seize each moment and do with it what I’ve always known must be done, rather than delay for another moment and another, until I become inured to what is actually morbid—mistaking inaction with satisfaction. 

As the plane begins its descent, again I feel the pulse, the rhythm, the force of Ida’s music. Today is her last performance; it is also her most beautiful.