My sister loved live music. A pillar of her relationship with her former partner was sharing music and traveling regionally to see shows. She used music to get he through the most turbulent part of her early and mid twenties. Music was a foundation upon which several of her close friendships were built.
One band in particular resonated with her more than all others. This band’s early discography is quite dark—the lead singer/songwriter used their music to work through his struggles with addiction, depression, and lacking self worth. I only learned after my sister’s death how much she identified with what I see as the darkest, angriest, most helpless album in the lineup, but it was through the catharsis of listening to this music that she was able to shrug off a lot of the baggage of a bad former relationship and significant self doubt.
That same band put out the first single of their most recent album in late 2022 and several others in early 2023 that had a distinct tone shift. Like the sun’s first rays breaking through stormy skies, this album promised to be an assertion of the growth and happiness the lead singer had found. My sister adored each new single and told her friends that it felt like the album was tracking with her own life. These were songs about not letting oneself be pulled under anymore and taking your rightful place in the sun.
The full album dropped in October, five months after my sister died. I listened to it on repeat and sobbed, wishing she could be in her house rocking out to music she would have loved. Some of the songs on the album knocked the breath out of me. But honestly, how could a song about not fearing death because you know you lived while you were alive not bowl you over?
So when they announced their North American tour for 2023-24, I knew I had to go to a show. I bought a ticket the same day and then buried the email in my inbox and kept my head down, focused on work and life, until the date arrived. I made the trek a few hours away with a friend, wearing one of my sister’s tees, the music-themed lapel pin I had made last year to gift people, a black choker that my sister would have always worn to shows, and the maroon (her favorite color) concert boots I had bought before a different musical pilgrimage for my sister last year.
I do not have the words for the familiar sense of guilty pain I felt standing there, wondering why I was at a venue enjoying this music and she was gone. Several of the songs made me cry, which I’m sure confused people around me, because they don’t seem like they should be emotional songs. The show was great, and seeing them live made me like them even more, though I will never know how much of that is the implied threads of my sister that are twisted around my experience of this band.
Every time I’ve gone out of my way to do something she would have done or experience something we never got to share directly in life, it hurts, a lot. I cry. I ruminate. I spend the next day or two trying to keep the wave of emotions at bay. But I also feel a sense of gratefulness in my core. If I let these opportunities pass me by, the regret would be insidious and far longer lasting than the acute sting I just described. I have to forge new memories and live new experiences without her, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be present implicitly.
So I guess if I have any advice for anyone, it’s that walking deliberately through the fire sucks a lot but sure feels better than sitting in the burning room and trying to convince yourself there’re no flames.
Unmoored Sister 