In my head today: River Run

This is one of the most haunting songs of loss I've ever heard. Not because it is about River Phoenix. I mean ya, sad he died and he was gone too soon. But that's not what I'm talking about here. In fact, had I found another video without him in it, I would have used it.

It's the sound of Beth Sorrentio's grieving voice. The feeling of loss is universal. Someone dies and then you slowly remove every part of their existence. Cancel their Social Security number, remove them from the world in ways both big and small. It is a horrible feeling, as if you are literally erasing them. They get more and more faint, until one day most of them is just invisible.

Maybe with the internet that is a little different. If I died (okay listen, going back to yesterday's post, I am NOT suicidal!) there would certainly be a record of me on the Internet. I'm all over the place. You dear reader (who is not there) don't know this, but I do have a few tiny spots here and there where I will live on in Internet Eternity. Not including this, which is merely an easier way of me talking to myself (talking through myself) than the muttering I usually do, or the journal I used to write.

But back to the point. Loss. In particular death, and this song. The other thing that strikes me is the strange things we feel the dead have missed out on. "You haven't heard my band yet, you haven't seen my house" Okay I get the band part - music is soul sighting. A gift you are sharing with the world. But your house? You haven't seen my house? It seems odd, and yet this is truly the sort of thing you think about. I wish so and so could have seen my garden this year. I think so and so would really have loved these earrings. That tie would have been fantastic on so and so. Who the fuck cares about that?

And yet it's what goes through our heads as we grieve. As if they are missing out on these tiny little details that make life..... life.

To those I have lost - some recent, some past - I miss you for who you are, who you were, the place you held in my life and you still hold in my heart. But I'm not sorry that you are not here to see my cat offer up another damned hairball on the carpet.

Anyway, the point is that I miss you all. And in one very specific case, this song is so poignantly true... A part of me thinks perhaps I knew that you would be gone too soon. Perhaps that is why the song always made my cry. J, I miss you and I love you. You were a rare gem.