As I am writing this, I am aware that today is the 4 th anniversary of my father’s passing. I have approached it with ambivalence. I feel anger with myself for nearly forgetting it was coming up. But I know he wouldn’t mind. He would would just want us to live happy lives. I also feel a lot of guilt, thinking I could have done more, seen him more. But guilt seems to follows us everywhere, all those I have personally known who have lost someone have expressed guilt and remorse in one form or another.
2 weeks before he died he tried to give me a necklace of a boxing glove that he always wore. He was a boxer in his youth. I kept pushing it away. I couldn’t understand why he was so insistent that I take it. In the end I took it and put it in my bag. The day after he died I reached into my bag and found it. I didn’t even remember it was there It was almost as he felt his ending was imminent. A couple of weeks later, he passed. And I will always remember that knock on the door, with 2 policeman on the other side. And even before they spoke, I knew.
Subsequently I lost that necklace he had given me and was devastated. That was when I realised that he wasn’t in that necklace after all. That jewellery was merely a symbol. Actually he was more active in my memories than in artifacts. And it is those I carry around with me, not a chain with a boxing glove attached.
Music is often a forum to channel grief, pain, and loss. Words alone are sometimes not enough. Without music we would struggle to express so much in the layers beneath the surface. I have needed music at times in my life when i was broken. It helped me survive. I remember the song by Don McLean: “Something broke me deep inside the day the music died “.
The first Lowkey song I heard was, Bars for my brother, about loss and grief. It resonated with me especially because it touched on feelings i had about my father’s death “why did I have to lose you to realise that I loved you “. I did always love him but I wish so badly that I had told him that more. It taught me not to leave things unsaid so you don’t have regrets.
Loss can take many forms. Addiction was present in my life for a long time. drugs were there for me, good and bad, through think and thin, they both helped me and hindered me. At first they brought relief from the internal pain i was experiencing but instead, ironically, they began to cause nothing but more pain. Soon my best friend became my biggest enemy. But still the loss of that relationship goes on and on.
We assume that loss is just related to bereavement. But it encompasses so much more. Loss can penetrate your soul. It invokes a line from a poem i wrote after my father died:
“My heart, just like yours that day, cannot be revived”
But somehow, in ways I don’t know and cannot describe, I have managed to survive. Some losses are needed in life in order to grow.
Kate Taylor