cw: death, grief

Almost every day from ages six to eight, my parents would drive me and my siblings from Washington Heights to our home in Throgs Neck, and we'd pass St. Raymond Cemetery. Sometimes we'd remember to say hi to my tio Paul and my great grandma Modesta as we drove by, specks among a blur of green and grey, along the exit to East Tremont Avenue. So much land for potential housing is swallowed in an ocean of the macabre here in New York City; my lack of experience in grief before this year would lead me to wonder why everyone doesn't just have themselves burned down to a pile and scattered across their relevant seas. The damnable 2026 has taught me the importance of building a monument, stones to hold our envy for their relative proximity to eternity.

"no, you're never gonna be released"

Through the tumult and tears of this year, I've found myself turning to the band Low, more specifically their 2021 experimental electronic record Hey What. The band formed the year I was born and I got into them 25 years late, via their beautiful 2018 release Double Negative. Hey What was, no pun intended, a doubling down on every idea from that record. It shrouds hopeful messaging and the wonder of observation in abrasive synth, guitar, and percussion textures, all competing to be the loudest and most overwhelming thing in your ear.

The first single they released, "Days Like These," kicks off with vocals by multiple Alans and Mimis, evoking a sort of church choir or sports chant, only to be swallowed by a synth freakout and the same vocals blown out, like that same church choir decided to scream through the pipes of the organ. Eventually you're allowed to relax, carried via the song's ambient outro and the words 'again...again...again...' into closure. The following track, "There's A Comma After Still," acts as an instrumental bridge between "Days Like These" and the crisis that befalls me this year, as it did Alan Sparhawk a few years back.

"don't walk away / I cannot take anymore"

Mimi Parker, co-founder of Low and Sparhawk's wife, passed away of ovarian cancer in 2022. It's all I can think about every time I listen to the somber track "Don't Walk Away," and why the album has been something of a balm to me this year, despite the pit in my stomach that it reminds about. Of the band ending with her passing, Sparhawk wrote: "Low is and was Mimi. I'm grateful." In its own way, Hey What serves as a monument to her memory, the dizzying grey streaks on the cover growing to resemble the rain falling on a grave.

"only a fool would have had the faith"

Sunday morning, I found out my grandmother Mervy had a stroke, a sort of final blow in a long line of hospital trips, close calls, and 'can't believe she got through that's that have dotted this year. So much has happened to the poor woman's body that I made my peace with the inevitability of Monday morning months ago. Maybe even too much peace. My mother called me awash in tears when she passed, barely able to speak. My brother couldn't breathe over the phone. But my father, like me, had a sort of calm easily identifiable as temporary. He was driving to work when I called him, and told me "it just hasn't really hit me yet."

Sunday also happened to be the day of Overheard's 2026 Big Walk, an adventure from Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan to Coney Island in Brooklyn, and sequel to the Manhattan top-to-bottom last year. I was upfront with the band and our compatriots about my state that day, that my grandmother most likely wasn't going to make it, and that I'd still like to make the endeavor and have this day of love and friendship and the celebration of our working feet. I kept it together for most of the day, until we passed yet more graveyards, seemingly ever-present and unavoidable in these boroughs. We hugged the southern border of Greenwood Cemetery and the western border of Washington Cemetery, and the latter was where I finally snapped.

"and I know what you want / to forget the hurt"

Washington Cemetery is mostly if not entirely composed of the gravesites of Jewish families, and I learned from the 2024 film A Real Pain that it's tradition among Jewish people for loved ones to place a stone upon a loved one's grave when visiting, just to let the person beneath them know they've been there. Or, maybe it's a totem to capture a fleeting connection between the worlds of the living and the dead. Either way, the stones will remain when flowers inevitably wilt and their plastic vases topple. Most graves at Washington Cemetery had many little stones atop them, remembrances, signs of care, monuments plucked from the dirt.

With my family seemingly slipping through my fingers like sand this year, I am yearning for little permanences, ways to remain tethered to the people I love who've started disappearing. I've been turning to Low and Hey What because hearing Mimi's voice amidst all that chaos, cacophony, synthy noise, and sonic beauty makes me feel like she's still around. And if Mimi's still around and prominent amidst the noise, maybe so is my tio Frank, maybe so is my Grandma Mervy. Maybe it's not my place to lay a stone atop my grandmother's new grave on Saturday, but in its presence next to my tios and her mother, I can feel that sense of permanence, a little tether. I can put my YIMBY tendencies aside for the sake of the dead, and the myriad ways we choose to remember and honor them.

"some other ocean at her feet"

When I see her on Friday and lay a flower on her casket on Saturday, I'll be reminded of her distinct veteran smoker's cough, of the view outside her 18th story apartment in the Bronx, of the way she made red beans and ceviche like no one else, how she said I was 'still (her) little genius' when she met Em for the first time last year.

She was a fiercely strong and tenaciously independent woman who could never settle, bouncing between NYC and Puerto Rico month by month when she was still able, some of the time taking me with her. On one of her more recent hospital visits, she told my Uncle, "get me outta here!" Always itchy in one place for too long, as is her wont, she's bounced from this life to the next, another to live on her own terms. She'd always been the kind of person that's very hard to forget and harder to pin down, and she departed just like Mimi sang:

"Leave my weary bones
and fly"

- Will

P.S. I’m doing as okay as one can be given the circumstances. Thanks to all of my loved ones who have been keeping me up and walking unreasonable distances this year.