There is a light that never goes out

When Daryl and I first met in grad school we shared so much music. MP3s were scattered all around his Dublin dorm room, and he would rifle through to play his favorite songs for me. Bob Dylan, The Smiths, The Charlatans, The Pogues, Manic Street Preachers, jumping off our shared love of Brit Pop we flew through the decades together.

We shared stories of concerts and moments we had with songs and lyrics. The fall of 2001 was freshly behind us, and he told me how many times he’d listened to The Strokes “Is This It?” while working crazy hours at the Mini-Cooper factory the year before, installing gear shift knobs over and over.

I first felt a spark with Daryl when we were having lunch at the Irish Film Center and he told me about how he’d written a paper at university comparing the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” to T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.”

I shared how I listened to Bob Dylan’s Live 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert in the days following Sept. 11 and how his lyrics and stripped down sound resonated with me on my long commute to and from work in those impossibly beautiful fall days when the world seemed to hang in the balance. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” especially prescient:

You must leave, now take what you need
You think will last
But whatever you wish to keep
You better grab it fast

Daryl had the rare ability to go deep on a topic and be grounded at the same time. Never condescending or a culture snob, he took you with him on that journey, made you excited to go back and listen to a song, or rewatch a scene from a movie. Listening to him talk about films he loved and music to experience how his mind worked, and wow, was that a beautiful thing.

When we met, I had fallen into Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” and we marveled at the portraits of the 1970s Dublin streets and characters he painted so vividly of in his lyrics, more short story than song. At a flea market off Grafton Street, we found a copy of The Jam’s “Sound Affects,” and would listen to “That’s Entertainment,” over and over again.

Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight
Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude

Getting a cab and travelling on buses
Reading the graffiti about slashed seat affairs

I tell ya that's entertainment, that's entertainment

Longing for something while it’s in front of you—that’s being young. Longing for something after it’s gone—that’s being old.

Music is my love language. Music is how I met friends and connected with the outside world. Standing in line for tickets or a midnight album release, you meet people, you talk, you exchange cigarettes and information.

In the pages of an old journal untouched for decades, I found a carefully crafted mix tape listing for an ex-boyfriend from twenty years ago: Tori Amos, P.J. Harvey, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley—the song titles stand as tiny iceberg caps of emotion, the order of songs mattered, a code for the recipient to unscramble.

Daryl read an interview with a musician who said , “If you find a girl who loves Nick Drake, marry her,” my fate sealed when he found my Nick Drake box set. It’s ridiculous how we ascribe a knowledge of music and film as “guy things.” We were only just out of the ‘90s, a world of Chuck Klosterman and emo shoe gazing, bands, the fierce honesty of Courtney Love and Riot Grrls seemed like a distant memory as we floated into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl era. Me liking Nick Drake and Bob Dylan somehow seemed revolutionary. Me liking The Big Lebowski, The Godfather and Spinal Tap, well, that just tipped the scales.

When we tried to find a wedding song, we found it nearly impossible to find one solely about that moment of being in love, of the comfort. We could only think of songs about falling in or falling out. And for every song we found, there was some line that just didn’t ring true or just seemed silly when applied to the two of us. So much saving, longing, hurting, elation, joy, rejections, revenge, healing-- but none of that calm stretch of what we call “commitment.”

We eventually half-jokingly agreed on John Lennon’s, “Oh, Yoko!” or The Smiths, “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” because of the short visa window, we never had a wedding, but I smile thinking of us sharing our wedding dance with a song about the joy of potentially getting hit by a ten-ton truck just to spend eternity together. The irony of that line has not been lost on me the last three years.

We spent a year after grad school mostly on two separate continents, this was before Skype and FaceTime, so we relied on daily phone calls to keep us going. Daryl would send me CDs with hand-picked songs. I still have a couple of them, one still rides in my car with me, “Transatlantic Tunes,” he dubbed it. I haven’t listened to it because I’m not sure I can go back to that time of so much hope and excitement for a future together.

“In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.”

―Oliver Sacks

After Daryl died, I took it upon myself to plan the playlist for the small memorial. Lots of The Smiths and The Beatles and Billy Bragg, and, of course, Oasis and Bob Dylan. On a recent long drive back from Michigan last week, I dared play it. When the MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” came on,. immediately, I was back to the day before Daryl’s memorial. Driving home after having my hair done, I rolled down the windows and turned up the volume so high I could not hear my voice shouting along to the lyrics of an uncertain future and its refrain, “We’re fated to pretend.” Speeding across the eerily COVID-empty college campus , the brilliant orange and yellow canopy of trees shading the road, I sobbed the entire way. I felt young and 1,000 years old all at once.

You think you’ll know what songs to skip on your playlist or to avoid at all costs, but, grief likes to keep you guessing.

I’ve been surprised by the random selection of songs that have hit me in the gut the last couple of years. They weren’t songs we listened to together, some I’m not even sure he ever heard:

Foo Fighters, “Everlong”

Ed Sheeran, “Afterglow”

Pink, “Who Knew?”

Jason Isbell, “If We Were Vampires”

Taylor Swift’s “Folkore” was the album we listened to driving to and from his radiation appointments his last summer, we were both surprised by how much we liked it.

I remember a day in July when we cycled to the park, left our bikes leaning against the trees and I told him the plans I had for recalibrating my work life. A near future we pretended we could share.

By late fall he was gone, and the beautiful yellow-leaved trees of summer were shedding, a pile of gold covering the ground where we had sat only a few months before when his tumors from the cancer were slowly returning, but we still had a little bit of hope.

That fall and winter, I returned to the same park, walking our dog under the skeletal branches of the trees, I listened to Folklore and wept.

Taylor Swift’s music and lyrics have been a central soundtrack to the newly forming me, a siren’s song guiding me through loss, beckoning me to come back to love and embrace my romantic heart.

Daryl was my golden one, the cherished album listened to over and over until you know every word. Now, I’m facing a life with an empty playlist, rebuilding who I am song by song.