See the stone set in your eyes
See the thorn twist in your side
I wait for you
U2 – May 1987
The coffin was black. Shiny dark wood, laid out at the front of the church where we were married.
The children sat beside me, my parents and sister just behind. Yet I was alone.
‘You’ll see Jenny again,’ said the village vicar. ‘You’ll have to be patient. So very patient and for such a long time. But you will be reunited.
And that was easy enough for him to say.
* * * * *
I’ve never forgotten those words, so they must have finally resonated somewhere. Yet it wasn’t the village vicar, but my old college friend Pete who had married us in that church, almost ten years before. Pete knew me better. He would have found the words.
It was in Pete’s frozen college room in the dying months of 1981 that I heard U2 for the first time. “Just brilliant – you’ve got to hear this song,” he commanded. And so I listened, even though he was clearly mad. Who were these Irish religious crackpots, singing in bloody Latin, for God’s sake?
Gloria – in te Domine
Gloria exultáte.
Pete was a Catholic, in those days, but he didn’t need to tell me that this was the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, updated by about 2000 years. Ding dong merrily on high.
The band grew on me. I took Jenny and my housemates to a fantastic U2 concert in London during the winter of 1984, and Jenny and I saw another show in Basel, Switzerland, in June 1987.
Almost unbelievably, there’s a scrappy recording of the entire concert still lurking online today.
I spent the rest of that summer on fieldwork in Spain, listening to the opening three tracks of The Joshua Tree as they spilled endlessly from the bar onto the streets of San Leonardo de Yagüe. Jenny visited for two stiflingly hot weeks of a Castillian August, before finally I returned alone to Switzerland. I had a single day to travel back to Berne before I was due in Oregon and England.
It was late afternoon by the time With or Without You found me, somewhere on a congested autoroute around the French city of Lyon. 700 miles were behind me with 200 more still ahead. My life was changing – for all the certainty I’d felt that summer, there was a new and unknown future opening in front of me now.
I drove fast through the evening rush hour. Low on sleep, high on impetuosity and countless cups of French black coffee. Racing at 150 km/h in heavy traffic on a twisting highway beside the River Rhône, with U2 at full volume. Maybe as close to stoned as I’ll ever get.
What can I say about this song? It’s carried me through good times and bad, and through certainty and doubt. With or Without You may not be my favourite U2 track, but it’s typical, with its chiming guitar and clear religious references – the theme of thorns and nails alluding to the crucifixion here.
As I hear the song today, it’s about the agonies of enduring love, in all its imperfection – that special love which comes through misunderstanding and suffering to emerge bruised and battered, yet stronger than before.
* * * * *
I looked across the black coffin towards the vicar, my mind drifting as he spoke. Surely I was in Spain, or Switzerland again – anywhere but here, and now.
Voices echoed, distorted through so many years – familiar words, binding back the threads of time.
12 responses so far ↓
marielsgarden // 17 April, 2008 at 02:23 |
The vicar makes it sound so easy. Actually sometimes I try to will that it wont have to be a very long one. I miss Mariel and the vicar’s words are all I’ve got to hold on to now.
Wishing you all the best with whatever part of the world you work brings you to these days. Take care and please keep sharing.
Linda // 17 April, 2008 at 08:49 |
Beautiful post, Roads. I can see it all, hear it from this measured distance, and time is as nothing. I travel the roads with you when I read your words, and I know that Jenny did, too, those many years ago. Thank you for continuing to share your life with her.
One of my greatest fears is that I will forget. Your writing is evidence that one does not forget, but remembers in an even more poignant state of mind, clear of the instant grief, more able to focus. This is a great comfort to me, and I’m sure, to countless others.
L.
Roads // 17 April, 2008 at 11:06 |
Bong
Many thanks for your note and best wishes. I see that you’ve been travelling – and a loss always hits you when you come home again. Nevertheless, we have to get out there, and do what we do. It’s a part of who we are, and you have to hang on to that.
Spirits up.
Roads // 17 April, 2008 at 13:26 |
Linda
Thank you for your encouragement and support. It’s wonderful to check in here and see how we are connected all around the world.
I saw Bong’s comment at breakfast time, from 8 hours ahead, and now as I scoff my lunch I find your note, written from 8 hours behind. The world turns, and the important things never really change.
The important memories are immutable. Detail, and day to day trivia fade with time, but the real emotions are saved somewhere much more secure. The building blocks and foundations of a life don’t crumble and fade through the assault of years.
Writing helps, but as you’ve also identified, music is at least as important in forging hard-wired connections. After years of seeing my CD stacks grow gradually dusty on the shelf, my iPod now reconnects me daily with reels of footage and memory files I didn’t realise I’d stored.
I played this song again last night as I ran along the towpath into the lengthening dusk of spring, realising that I can remember that late summer’s evening beside the Rhône on more clearly than I can recall most of last week.
Finally I sprinted home up the hill in the dusk, pulled out a pick and made some long-delayed progress in laying down the strings for I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. And the faltering arpeggio I shared with my teenage kids half an hour later was happily filed for future recall.
funnyoldlife // 18 April, 2008 at 14:33 |
U2 is a favourite of mine as well. Certain songs hold old memories and feelings for me – it’s a very powerful medium. I find it carries me through the sad times and buoys me in the good – it always seems to have a right time and place.
Roads // 18 April, 2008 at 23:21 |
Thanks, funnyoldlife, and a warm welcome back.
What you say is very true. That might just be the wonder of music. We share a song, and yet what we really have in common is exactly that we all own a slightly different part of it…
shadowlands1501 // 19 April, 2008 at 07:27 |
Dear Roads
This is a hard post for me to read, yet it is Jenny’s story and your heartache…
I don’t know….I cannot fathom the moment, at least not yet, maybe not ever..but I know that it is a part of this journey.
Roads // 19 April, 2008 at 11:45 |
I’m so sorry, Shadowlands. Love does conquer all.
Cranius // 19 April, 2008 at 13:58 |
Dear friend,
This to me is one of your most wonderful posts. Wonderful in the way you’ve crafted it. It is also a bit of an eerie one (is that the right word?) and it saddens me to see you’re hurting. I feel that you were building the tension in your last two posts (Chapter 13, parts 4 and 5). You leave too many things unsaid, I dare not speculate out of respect for your feelings.
Music is a matter of continuity in your stories and I too see it as perhaps my strongest ally in my fight (without the urge to compare them). The way you write about the songs, your friend, your kids and family: you’ve done it so much better than that village vicar.
I hope I’m at least partly right with my conclusion in the first paragraph. Keep going Roads. Without experience I strongly believe that the further you go down this road you will forget details but you may gain even more!
Payter
Roads // 19 April, 2008 at 15:18 |
Thank you, Payter – a namesake of my old friend, Pete, I see. It’s kind of you to write, especially as you’ve got such a busy time ahead.
I try to write these scenes in the moment, as I lived them. But you don’t need to worry. Am I hurting? No, not any more. There’s a life gone by, but it’s even more important to realise that there’s a life ahead, and to grab it with both hands. Life today is very different, full of rocks and running, as well as new places and stacks of food.
This site is all about experience, subsumed and assimilated. I worked it over and worked it out, a long time ago. Writing it down is just to share it, and help other people to come to terms with loss.
Once lived, perhaps times like these can never entirely leave you. But that is true of all experience. And it’s experience that makes us who we are.
Many thanks again for writing, and all best wishes for your operation on 24th April. I’ll be thinking of you on Thursday. Your friend – Roads.
cathyb // 28 April, 2008 at 00:16 |
I just saw the documentary “Young@heart”, and they sang a few songs that held very strong memories of the time Lou was ill…the first being “Fix You” by Coldplay. How that song unglued me then, and now. How it spoke to me then, and leaves me empty now. Unable to “fix” him. Music does that to you, it does. It’s good, but it’s hard. The memories it can invoke. Powerful. I love U2 as well.
Cathyb
http://www.lessonsfromlou.blogspot.com
Roads // 28 April, 2008 at 17:18 |
Music is a direct link to the past. It’s enormously powerful and can be difficult, as you say.
I had to buy a lot of new records soon after Jenny died, because it was too painful to listen to the soundtrack of happier times.
Now, of course, I’m enormously grateful for that connection with the past. But it took me a long time to get there.