may 2, day 120

My recital. I managed not to cry.

I kept this in my pocket the whole time. You really were sentimental, it’s rubbing off on me.

may 6, day 124

I’m no longer writing everything addressed to you, Dad. Somedays yes, some days not. The objects change, the tense is changing.

may 6, day 124, a reflection of grief and improvisation.

I finally am finished with my last Incomplete from last semester, unable to finish up my last assignments when I got the news that you had Covid, and then only days later were in the ICU.

In this moment I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I reflected a bit on creative improvisation and this “grief process.”

I.

so, I guess I’m going to talk about this process, grief.

On December 13, 2020, I called my mom to learn that she and my dad had tested positive for Covid-19, and that she was frantically driving my dad to the hospital. Five days later, they moved him to the ICU, they couldn’t get his oxygen levels up. On December 28, in the middle of the night, the doctors were forced to intubate him. My father quickly went into multi-organ failure. On January 2, 2021, the doctor asked us how much longer we wanted to keep him on the machines, and told us he wasn’t going to wake up. It took him about twenty-six minutes to pass away.

My contact with my father was over Zoom. We were told again and again that hearing is the last sense to go, and so I played music for him. I played Amazing Grace on the violin for him. I played recordings for him, mainly his favorite, “Turn Turn Turn” by Judy Collins, and a piece I had written for him called “Daughter” (which is a piece born out of improvisation that I wrote over a few years, but a story for another day).

After he died, I didn’t touch my violin, or listen to music, for over a month. It took me about two months before I could touch my violin again with any real sense of meaning. It took months before I could improvise. Even though I was in my last semester of a masters degree in contemporary improvisation and performance from The New England Conservatory of Music, I sat in silence. For some reason, though, I did start writing.

At the time, I couldn’t understand that these things aren’t separate. Looking back, it’s clear that the process of grief is a process of improvisation, and that from day one, I was, I am, improvising. A slow, painful, important improvisation.

II.

“Don’t edit” are the first words I wrote, on January 4. A lot and a little have followed. I haven’t really gone back to anything I’ve written, and I’m still trying not to edit.

III.

Surrounded by the noise and drama of music school, I tried and failed to do and feel anything but overwhelming, panic-inducing grief and disconnection. In February, I think as the shock started to ‘wear off’ or as the need to be more functional in school and in work started to return, instead I retreated, unable to connect to people, losing friends. Unable to focus on sound, on noise, instead just a stinging silence. I almost dropped out of school, one semester before finishing my degree. I stopped sleeping and starting have panic attacks. I also stopped writing.

IV.

Sometime in early April, I started reading Roland Barthes’ book Mourning Diaries. The experience of grief is so personal, and yet every word someone writes or shares about their grief resonants in a way you never thought could until you’re in it too. He wrote in his October 29th entry, “her death might be a liberation in some sense with regard to my desires. But her death has changed me, I no longer desire what I used to desire. I must wait - supposing that such a thing could happen - for a new desire to form, a desire following her death.”

It’s a deep truth. In the daily meeting of grief, I realized that I didn’t want to play as I had. I didn’t know how to anymore. I have to find something new, or, I need to wait for it. Barthes described it as “I limp along through my mourning.” Apt. Slowly.

Stagnation, movement, stillness, tiny moments of joy, improvisation.

On March 30, 2021, almost three months since my father died, something changed, or broke, or regrew, and for one day I improvised on my violin with an insane passion. I found that “present tense” moment, I guess. I don’t know where it came from, as Barthes wrote, I was subject to an occasional gust of life. I thought of my dad dying, the vivid memory of seeing his death on Zoom, of the lack of connection and touch, and I played.

First this, inspired in part off of Ornette Coleman’s tune “Ballad.”

And then this. I thought about the number of minutes it took my father to die. I thought about what it looked like. I thought about the doctor who stayed with him, and the nurses who held his hands. The tubes, the machines, the ending.

I still don’t know how to describe the feeling of playing this, but something really did break in me, in a necessary way.

It’s important for me to write again that I almost dropped out of school. In the silence and frustration, I didn’t know how I was supposed to be at music school when I was physically adverse to the thought of playing, of improvising, of knowing how to even do it. But somehow, I managed.

Again, I think back to one of Barthes’ entries in his own mourning diary. “Mourning is absolute,” he wrote. Our investment in mourning the person who we’ve lost is absolute. And yet, he continues, “she offers me lightness, life, as if she were still saying: '‘but go on, have a good time.” I didn’t know what this meant until I managed to have this moment with my violin.

And somehow, this process of grief now includes music-making. In a way, for me it relates to Barthes’ question about grieving, “What does the present tense mean?” My connecting with my father, in present moments here and there, happens through these states of improvisation.

A few weeks later, I revisited this new vocabulary, in a noisy practice room at school. I cried as I finished playing.

V.

Staying in school meant having a recital. For me, there was no other way but to deal with this whole semester, everything that followed the day I learned my father was sick, publicly, for better or worse.

I performed “twenty-six minutes,” now the third time I’ve revisited these memories in this way.

VI.

A momentary full circle.

As I neared the date of my recital, I recorded a four-layer improvisation of “Turn, Turn, Turn,” this song, this melody that is now so stuck to me, the last piece of music my father ever heard, or at least, I hope he heard.

I chose to end my recital by playing this. I asked Delfina Cheb (voice) and Afarin Nazarijou (qanun) to join me. When we first started rehearsing for this, we tried to play it like Judy Collins would. It didn’t make any sense. The day before the performance, I told Delfina and Afarin that the only way I’d be able to do this was to improvise through the melody with them.

It turned out to be the only way I could think to honor this melody that has become so important to me, that was so important to him. Leading an improvisation through this melody was the only way I could bear witness to this moment.

VII.

That’s all I can do for now. In order to get through this final semester of my master’s degree, I pushed a lot aside. I have a feeling that as soon as it’s over it’s all going to come crashing down on top of me. Probably, I’ll find myself in silence again. At least time, I see that it’s all apart of this process of growth, of grief, of improvising my way through this mess, and necessarily, importantly, finding ways to reconnect with myself and the world.

I hope that I’ll be a little less afraid of it the next time around.

may 9, day 127

Someone I knew from what seems like a past life, Molly McLeod, writes a newsletter occasionally. I don’t always open them, but today the subject was “Notes on grief,” and so this time I opened it. Sadly, she has lost someone she knew closely. She wrote about a death, “It completely rocked my world. It rewrote all the rules.”

It really does describe the feeling, constant. I want to come back to this.

may 11, day 129

I miss you a lot, today. I’m a day away from being done with all of the work I’ve had to catch up on this semester. Pretty soon I’m not going to have anything to hide behind, and I can feel it start to creep back.