musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

How bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another’s eyes


Something I read a while ago started me thinking again about how we perceive things[i]. Some conditions, like hot and cold, lie at opposite ends of a spectrum I suppose, but is it necessarily the same with happy and sad? Binaries tend to mark edges -boundaries, by and large- but they don’t really define the terrain. Usually, what I want to know is what something is, not what it isn’t.

I grew up with music; every Saturday, my grandfather insisted on listening to ‘Saturday Afternoon at the Opera’ on the radio. Over the years, I fell under the influence of symphonies, chamber music, and recitals, although I had little or no abilities to match my enthusiasm. Still, even at an early age I could identify major and minor keys, and experience the expected moods they invoked: major keys were happy and invigorating; minor key signatures were sad and, well, thoughtful. Mournful…     

I just assumed that major and minor keys were things everybody would recognize and feel the same about. But thinking about it now that I am retired and have the time to reflect more deeply, I wonder if the mood of music did not lie in its key or mode, but largely in what I had been conditioned to expect all these years. In many ways, the effects of music are like the metaphors in poetry: if the metaphor used is not culturally recognizable, it is more confusing than evocative.

But what is it about music that evokes feelings? If it is not a song and there are no words to guide our thoughts, is it the tempo, the consonance (or dissonance) of the chords, or simply the melody itself? Perhaps there is no definitive pattern that mandates particular feelings -we all have our favoured tastes, colours, and opinions, so why would music be any different? Although we are influenced by those around us, does the same apply to music, or do we stubbornly maintain our individual agency even there?

Why, for example, do we expect sombre music at a funeral? With a few cultures, it is the opposite: lively music and dancing, for example, are ways to indicate the importance of the deceased person, ways of paying respect to their memory. But when a friend or relative dies, it is sometimes difficult to celebrate what has been lost. To treat the commemoration as a party seems, well, disrespectful…

My brother and his wife both died during the time of Covid restrictions, and his family and friends were not able to get together for an ash-scattering ceremony as the two of them had wished. We had lived quite far from each other for years, and as befits a brother who was ten years my senior, we had grown apart in other ways too. He had always been the spokesman, the wise elder when it came to the family; staid and knowledgeable, I respected his wisdom, and feared his disapproval which could be withering. But I suppose love encompasses a melange of feelings, doesn’t it?

At any rate, his adult children decided to wait until the following summer when the fear of contagion had been tempered with vaccinations and booster shots. And since my brother had wished the ashes to be distributed in the ocean near where they lived, there seemed even less risk than with a more traditional ceremony indoors.

I have to say that even though I wanted to pay my respects to my brother and sister-in-law, I was not looking forward to reliving the grief again, 18 months later. Still, the venue was appropriate -perfect, even. The rite was to be performed on the shore immediately adjacent to the house of their best friend. Although I had never been there, my nephew had assured me of its beauty and privacy; but as important as that was, I was more concerned with the inevitable sombre attitude: the tears and the solemness expected and demanded of the occasion. My brother’s friends -the ones still surviving- were really quite elderly, and I imagined a scene at the beach where they would all be whispering and tearful as they, too, confronted their own mortalities.

I must confess that, I had never been to a funeral which had not included a religious service and subsequent formal interment of the remains. At any rate, my nephews and niece had termed the ritual a ‘celebration’ although I had trouble envisioning it that way. They met me at my hotel and, despite my attempt to wear dark, and lugubrious clothing, they asked me to change into jeans and more comfortable attire; after all, it was at a beach, my smiling niece pointed out as soon as she saw me.

They drove me to the ocean-side house with its little beach, and led me down to the rock-strewn sand where they had positioned chairs and a few tables for the afternoon. The tide, they told me was on its way out, so we’d have plenty of time to talk and reminisce.

In fact, although there were only five or six people already wandering around, we were greeted with laughter and smiles as some of them, no doubt practicing for the ashes to come, were trying to skip stones along the surface of the water. And, perhaps almost as unexpected as the laughter and camaraderie from the long socially-isolated friends, was the music coming from one of my brother’s old cassettes blaring out of his equally dated boom box. I could almost see my brother and his wife dancing among the rocks; his friends -even those not competing with their stones- were certainly bobbing their heads to the beat.

“We thought he’d like that,” explained my niece, trying to tempt me into dancing in a little rockless patch of sand. “We used to tell him to turn it down sometimes, but that would just make him turn up the volume… Dad was like that, you know.”

Actually, I didn’t know that about him.

“Mom would shrug, and turn it down for us, but not before the two of them would wink at each other,” she continued. “It was a game they used to play.”

One of my brother’s friends eventually hobbled over to the cassette and flipped it off. “Always wanted to do that, ya know,” he said  with a twinkle in his eyes, as the sound of the gently lapping waves reasserted itself along the beach.

The friend’s wife, sitting in a wheelchair, smiled at her husband, and then signalled with her hand for me to come over. “Your brother had a side he seldom showed to strangers,” she said. “For them he was an academic, albeit one with rather controversial views, but for us, he was always fun, always thoughtful, and always mindful of our opinions.” Her throat seemed hoarse, so she stopped to drink a glass of lemonade from the table beside her. “He could be naughty sometimes, even raucous, but never disrespectful. He… they -the two of them were a team- always knew when to change the music; always sensed when we wanted to talk…” She looked into my eyes for a moment. “Bringing the boom box down here was a good idea, don’t you think? It was so… them!”

I learned a lot about my brother and sister-in-law that day. And I learned that for them, sad music, or sombre recollections would have been inappropriate. That wasn’t at all who they had been, apparently, although they’d certainly shown me several different sides of their lives over the years.

So I was grateful for that all too brief revelation at the beach. Sometimes it takes a death to teach us what we never knew we had.

[i] https://theconversation.com/how-your-culture-informs-the-emotions-you-feel-when-listening-to-music-171248

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