Nancy Wallace’s quiet cover is more openly tragic than the original Pretenders song. I had long assumed that 2000 Miles was about a long-distance relationship. It isn’t. Chrissie Hynde wrote it after the Pretenders’ original guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, died of a cocaine-induced heart failure. He was 26.
The children were singing / He’ll be back at Christmastime
The lyrics sound so different to me now. How much of the difference was learning that this song is about a death? How much was that I’ve learned, more personally, what death is about? I used to see grief as one node in a thesaurus cluster with sadness and longing and misery. Now it stands out.
Julian Barnes, again, since his words are so much clearer than mine:
Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many cars of the same make there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed.
The cruelty of death is a major theme of the secular solstice ceremony that my friends organize each December. We’re a sufficiently transhumanist group that many of the speeches and songs advocate for the abolition of death. I’m not sure if we’ve read from the The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant (words, video) at the solstice, but it’s certainly in the right mode.
I would have said that death was tragic, before, but I believed that in a muted and statistical way. That death is no longer impersonal shouldn’t make such a difference. It does. C.S. Lewis, writing about the same feeling from a less secular perspective:
Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, and not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern… If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled ‘Illness’, ‘Pain’, ‘Death’ and ‘Loneliness’. I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.
Well, I suppose it’s debatable how much less secular his perspective is. I don’t believe in an immortal soul, but it’s not a fully faithless impulse to wish that one could be engineered.
I was worried that I’d feel isolated during the solstice ceremony, that I’d be able to see that the people onstage were still just playing with a counter labelled ‘Death’. Instead, someone recited the eulogy that he had written, two years earlier, for his father. Hearing his voice break was distressing, and I did not feel alone.
For the last two years, the solstice has taken place in a planetarium. The eulogy had been given in darkness. I couldn’t see the organizer walk back on stage as it ended, but I heard her speak into the microphone.
“We are about to sit in silence for two minutes. If you’re open to it, I want you to look up into the darkness and think of someone you’ve lost. Someone whose voice you will never hear again. Someone whose mind is gone from the world forever. Give them your grief, but also give them your resolve.”
So I looked up at the dome of stars, and I thought about Zach, and I cried in that new way that I do. I couldn’t see the other people sitting in the planetarium, but I could hear that some of them were crying, too.
I thought, sincerely, I would do anything to have them back.
I amended that to anything [that Zach would be okay with].
I wish that mattered.
I wish that particular bit of resolve were transmutable into a resolve to prevent children from dying of malaria or governments from imprisoning their innocents or scientists from making new weapons. I wish I could transmute it into being a kinder friend or a more patient daughter. Unfortunately, Zach’s absence doesn’t appear to have made me into a better person. So far, it has just made me into a person who really misses Zach.
(And one who can’t listen to I’ll think of you / Wherever I go in quite the same way.)
- Tessa
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