Hello, again. We haven’t seen each other in a couple of weeks. I would have been back here sooner but no one wants me writing about the Annual Catholic Appeal. We have more appropriate professionals for that.
It’s now Lent. It’s a little later this year but it always seems to come at the right time.
We always know we need a Lent to fix ourselves but we can never quite stop the fixes from being needed enough during the liturgically green and other color times of the year.
One thing that happens every Lent, as everything gets more subdued, is pondering and reflecting on death — that thing that’s going to happen to all of us.
We have all experienced death in some way. Many of us have had close relatives or friends die. We’ve all had to accept that once someone is gone, they are gone.
Much of what they did here may remain as an echo in some way, but they are gone for good. We adjust to living our lives without them.
So, that’s what death is
I was listening to music at a very young age.
Whether it was tunes that accompanied music videos on MTV, the radio, or the household “record” and tape collection, music was playing a lot.
I don’t mean things like Snoopy or Mickey Mouse or Daffy Duck. I mean like actual music recorded by (more or less) adults and meant for consumer consumption.
In those early early years, the names and music of people such as Elvis, Buddy, and Jimi entered my awareness.
One thing I learned about them early on — they are all dead. They died and died young.
I could see and hear their performances but they were no longer with us. My brain had to categorize them somehow as not like the living. I can’t speak fully about how three, four, and five-year-old Kevin was processing this, but the brain was doing something to accept the notion of “dead”.
There were many alive musicians and performers, of course, that were around to be seen and heard.
Some of them influenced me to later learn how to play music myself, albeit quite amateurishly.
One of these guitar players — who motivated me to pick up the instrument for myself a few years later — was performing in Wisconsin in August of 1990. He didn’t make it out of Wisconsin alive.
Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash in the early morning hours after his final show at Alpine Valley near East Troy.
Later that day, I was told that this guitar player — who I was learning more and more about and hearing more and more of his music — was dead. He wouldn’t make any more music.
Six-year-old Kevin had to process that somehow. The music was still listenable, but the man was gone.
A few months later, it was December 8, 1990. How on Earth do I remember that date? The radio said it was the 10th anniversary of the shooting murder of John Lennon.
I was becoming more aware of who The Beatles were but didn’t have the full story.
Now I knew there was this band member who was, himself, no longer with us.
Even The Beatles had a “dead” aspect to them. Seven-year-old Kevin had to ponder that one.
The next month, Steve Clark, guitarist for Def Leppard, possibly the first band I was ever made aware of and liked, died. Mixing drinking and drugs took him.
The band, whose full-color poster had a prominent place in my bedroom, would never be quite the same again. One more thing Kevin had to figure out in life in a few short months.
Acceptance
I didn’t have many deaths of people close to me at a young age that I needed to cope with.
My grandparents died when I was either not here yet, really young, or in my adult years so they weren’t examples of death to be learned from at a young age.
Instead, it was music that introduced the concept of death to me.
Odd? Perhaps. But we all have our paths in life.
As the last three decades-plus have gone on, my understanding of death (I think) has matured. It’s no longer just “so much for that album ever being finished”. It’s understanding loss and understanding reality.
No matter how accomplished someone is in this life, something will end their work.
No matter how loved and cherished someone is in this life, something will take them from us.
If we’re lucky, someone might even miss us when we go. Someone might look back on the things we did and appreciate our work.
If we’re really in a good place, we’ll be in a good place. Those still here can ask us to intercede for them and maybe we’ll be able to.
The good we could do in Heaven would be greater than any guitar chords played on Earth, but those sounds were still beautiful.
There’s a lot we and others can do here. There’s more to be done in Heaven.
Thank you for reading.
I’m praying for you.