Sadness and Songs to Match
Last Sunday was the anniversary of 9/11. It was also the day after a memorial service for my friend Adrienne’s mom. Early that day, I sat alone, rain pouring over the morning. Drops tapped against my deck, a solemn beat. It was both sorrowful and comforting. Much the way a sad song is.
After a day of journeying through memory, through past, present, and future loss; a day of love and grief mingling together with food and laughter, I drove off listening to “No Hard Feelings,” a song by The Avett Brothers. It’s a song so layered with love and sadness and memory for me that I only listen to it when I’m comfortable letting myself cry. Maybe you have a song or songs like this. This particular one was chosen to accompany the photo montage video at Adrienne’s memorial service two years ago. I had never heard it before that day. Now when I hear it, I think of Adrienne of course—of her death surrounded by friends and family—but also of other lost loves, of my own eventual death, of my children. “When my body won’t hold me anymore, and it finally sets me free, will I be ready…when the light sinks low in the west and the light in my chest can’t be kept held at bay any longer…”
As I listen, my heart fills up with loss, with vastness, with connection to all the people I love no longer here and all my loved ones who are. What else, I wonder, is there really to do with all this life and death but love big and let go of every hard feeling possible?
It’s an interesting scientific brain phenomenon to contemplate the power of sad songs. Sadness, as a primary emotion, is experienced equally through cultures and generations. Yet, when it’s felt in an aesthetic context, it’s experienced paradoxically as pleasurable. For some people, listening to sad music produces this sort of pleasure. Researchers link this to the music’s capacity for producing sweet nostalgia among other things. Listening to sad music can help us experience vicarious emotions and empathy with others as we acknowledge we’re not alone in our emotions and almost like we have an imaginary friend. This can lead us to connect with a profound emotional aspect of ourselves. Crying at sad songs can function to heal and nourish, to soothe grief and create a feeling of calmness, through the release of prolactin, a hormone our systems create when we cry. And as we focus on the beauty of the song, and potentially disconnect from our distress, our mood may be regulated. While I’ve experienced this, my whole being somehow nourished and regulated after a good sad song and a river of tears, it’s not the case for everyone that sad songs create pleasurable responses. So notice, pay attention, see how this is for you.
For me, as I drove away from this past weekend’s memorial service, I cried just enough until I could sit and feel not one hard feeling, just a very full heart. I’d spent the day remembering Adrienne and her mom as I gathered with friends and family, enjoying the easy companionship of people I no longer see frequently, all gathered around what was once Adrienne’s kitchen bar. I’d spent the evening laughing with my brother and sister and law, with my husband and our group of kids, eating too much delicious food, as the night sky drizzled lightly down onto us, as if the “firmament” couldn’t hold back such joy and could only weep with our laughter.
Oh, to have no hard feelings. To let go into wonder—"where will I go? Will the trade winds take me south through Georgia grain, tropical rain, or snow from the heavens?” Perhaps all this rain falling over me this morning.
The song pricks my heart and reminds me how alive I am right now. That being alive right now is a gift to be savored, an improbable gift, and unguaranteed. I weep, but I don’t feel sad. Instead, I am content to feel the vastness of these feelings, not one so hard as to be left out.
Yoga Classes This Weeks:
Wednesday Night on the Farm: Join me for Yoga Under the Sky at Soul Food Farm, at 1665 Persimmon Ln, Shepherdstown, WV, 25443. 6:15-7:15 PM. All standing practitioners welcome. $10. Message me at 401-440-0279
Friday Morning: Live in person at 211 East New Street in Shepherdstown, WV, and on online via Zoom. 9:30-10:30. Recording sent after class. Message Christa at 401-440-0279 to register.