“It meant I hadn’t died with my husband, it meant I was back among the living, and that raised the stakes.” A tribute to the music of Maggie Rogers that speaks to the healing power of music…
by: Lily Herman
Trigger Warning: This story contains a reference to suicide that may trigger some readers.
Rituals can enter our lives in one of a few ways. The first — and perhaps most prevalent in our culture — is through a Protestant-inspired perseverance. We want to learn a second language, so we rely on a little cartoon to offer rewards in the form of daily gold stars. We want to start running, so we join a group whose members will remind us of our goals, and lightly shame us when we skirt them. We beat ourselves up when we don’t accomplish all that we set out to do, or puff up with an excess of pride when we do. In the earliest days following my husband Daniel’s death, I tried to use these will-powered techniques to embrace a new path. Our life together had been so tumultuous, and his death had consumed me so completely, that I reached for identity like a life raft. I needed to be nameable, tangible, something that couldn’t be washed entirely away. A religious commitment seemed like just the thing.
I first prayed in Baltimore, where I was born. When I fled the east coast and all of my married memories, I prayed in Arizona, where I enrolled in grad school for creative writing. In the summers, when I returned to an Alaskan village for my third and fourth seasons on a salmon fishing crew, I prayed. And when the quarantine meant that I had to take classes remotely, I went on the road with a transient lover, one of those ghosts who is conjured in mourning and, as if obeying an unspoken, ancient code, does you no further harm but likewise can’t come with you into the future. We floated together along the road for weeks, jumping into meltwaters in early spring. I walked a little distance from him and prayed at the Spiral Jetty, in Glacier National Park, in an Idaho valley below the mountainous hot springs we’d had to wear ice cleats to reach. I prayed in a van in Utah, rocked by wind, holding two candles alight in one hand while I covered my eyes with the other–singing my prayer to the Bonneville Salt Flats.
The prayer was all that steadied me when I looked back at the chaos of my marriage and the suicide which had drawn a violent, final line under it. I prayed that my husband had not suffered, that he was OK, that he was waiting for me somewhere verdant and warm. Above all, I prayed for sanity.
But the part of me that had seen and loved Daniel right away, the part that had agreed to marry him after only two weeks of dating, couldn’t be compelled toward sanity so easily. There was still a wildness in me, and in his wake, I was determined to find a less destructive outlet for it. Prayer became a way to allow it out, because there is fury and froth in any authentic, full perception of God. In the stories, there are doors guarded against murder with the blood of lambs, lambs guarded against wolves by miracles, nearly-slewn sons spared at the eleventh hour. And of course, in the story that spoke most directly to me — as a freshly-widowed twenty-eight year old — there is Ruth, a woman who went with her husband into a new land, and would not forsake him even when he died.
I was eating blini at an Oscars party when one of my friends casually said, “You know you’re a catch.” I smiled and toasted her, then went home to my apartment and leaned over the sink, sobbing, I don’t, I don’t know. And I didn’t, and perhaps this elucidates why we turn to God in grief–because we can’t see ourselves. When I looked into the mirror to see a catch, I just saw a hole that was swallowing me. I knew that every love I’d ever felt, everyone I’d ever wanted, I must have wanted too hard, because they’d all been swallowed eventually, taken away by this same pit. I’d wanted them till they went away, and in their absence, it was so tempting to tell myself the false story that they’d come to me in the first place not because I was worthy of their love, but by pure chance. It had started to feel like there was only one thing that happened to my heart. But at the same time, I felt patient in that loss, because it was so all-encompassing that I couldn’t make any sort of move until it was done with me. I knew that I was destroyed, and that nothing could flourish on the site where we had fallen so spectacularly apart, so there was no hurry to move on. I didn’t look into the mirror and consider that my face might be aging too quickly to find someone new. I looked and saw that I was one million years old, like all of us are. I knew that Daniel’s death saved me, in a way — from the other things he might have done, yes, the things people do besides suicide when they are desperate and volatile — but also saved me from having to experience the heartbreak like a living woman. I was allowed to effectively die with him.
A mutual friend once told me that since his death, it had been Daniel’s best — his most nurturing, his most maternal self — who came back in visitations and visions. I feel this, too, a sweet face watching me with pursed, smiling lips when I sing offkey, when I make a dorky or a dirty joke, whenever I am engaged in being the girl Daniel loved. And when I accidentally tap into loneliness, like a river of oil I am trying to lightly tread above, when I feel its slick, dark mouth meeting mine, when I feel like I’m being forced to drink my way out and am choking with my face in its swirls, I feel him then, too — his kindest self, his promises that I won’t feel this way forever. I hear the words he spoke on his last day alive, when everything had gotten so complicated, and I had no idea how much worse it was going to get — and he told me that if he was sure of anything, it was that I was going to be happy. When I am sad, when this sadness drags me under, I reflect upon this, and I sometimes protest, as if he’s sitting there with me and has failed to pay up. You promised.
But the other way that we begin to practice rituals, the way less spoken about, is not a commitment we make & then struggle to maintain. It’s the complete reverse, the kind of practice which arises organically from the breath of our inextinguishable life, the things we build with our bodies and only bother to name later. In this spirit, I queue up, “In the Living Room,” by Maggie Rogers, and take a deep breath.
Rogers’ music found me on the winds of the deeply transitional time immediately following Daniel’s death. I discovered her by chance, because a friend, the brilliant Zia Anger, had directed a few of her music videos, and I was eager to check out Zia’s work. I was in a period of total physical numbness, which lasted for several years. My body only had one of a few reactions to stimulus: if someone got upset with me, I felt it get small and shrink into itself, and when I tried (out loud or in writing) to tell any story about Daniel, any story about myself, anything at all from my recent life, my arms and legs went numb. On countless occasions, intimacy made me dissociate completely, and often I came to, realizing I had floated away for an unknown measure of time. When I returned, I re-entered my body with a graceless crash, like the innards didn’t quite fit the template. I would convulse and sob, and on many occasions had to ask fleeting partners to read to me until my breathing slowed, or to physically rub my arms, legs, or chest, until the absent feeling returned to them in low, sorrowful peals. I am grateful that they mostly obliged, in spite of the fact that this was probably a request above their job description.
As I contended with what felt like the death of love, Rogers, by contrast, sang about love as interminable. She sang in terms that explained it as steadfast, even as the people in love changed, sometimes beyond the point of usefulness or generosity to one another. “I know things are changing / But, darling, I’m saying, I’ll be singing you in all of my songs.” She had a salt-and-sea of the earth appeal, she was a Maryland girl like me, she seemed able to claim a tried-and-true Lucinda wisdom and throatiness even in youth, her voice rising like a current zipping along an electrical wire.
The way she posited herself as avoidant, again and again, proved oddly comforting in my loneliness: “And I keep running away / But when I leave, you pull me in again,” she sang in “Want Want,” a song about desire, how little it will accept facsimiles, how eventually it has to get fed. “I never loved you fully in the way I could,” she sang, and as someone who had always loved fully — maybe too fully and too quickly, and who had just seen that tendency cost me everything — it meant so much to hear her break down every withholding wall to let loose. To see her return to someone, and demonstrate the depth of her care for them, when maybe they’d been wondering at its measure. It felt like an angel doubling back to tell me that everything that I’d ever felt had counted, in all the ways I’d hoped it would.
I danced to her music with my limbs still numb, so that it felt like no one was controlling them. Slowly I returned to the helm. Sometimes I filmed these moments, so that I could look at myself from the outside, instead of peering out a body which, at that time, still seemed to be a shuttered house. I am glad I did. I can look back now and see that I danced to “Want Want,” by the Baltimore waterfront, I danced to “Give a Little” in a house I sublet in Montana during a particularly cold spring, when the scent of ponderosas had just begun to emerge above the snow. I danced to “On + Off,’ naked and smeared with the dandruff shampoo that cured a skin rash, in an Alaskan cabin where I spent two months alone.
Above all, I danced to “Fallingwater” absolutely everywhere. This was the first of Rogers’ songs that I encountered, because it was the first linked on Zia’s website — the white sand dunes where they shot the video, the expression of Rogers’ dancing, her red caftan against the hot sun, and then, as the sun set, her drenched and screaming, in black work boots and blue jeans, as the song devolved into exactly how “stuck upstream” she was. I was, too. My body was like an object warping through space, without a sense of gravity or home, just moving toward a hope I could hardly name, trusting her to help take me there. “Go on and tell me just what I’m supposed to say,” I sang with Rogers, thinking back on what now felt like the inevitability of my husband taking his own life. “As if it could be any other way.” I danced to “Fallingwater” at writing residencies in racetrack New York and mud-season Maine, in Tucson, beside the lagoon-like pool that I shared with five artist neighbors, triangulated between one dusty fig tree, one palm tree which dropped heavy, wooden leaves in monsoon winds, and one orange tree which bore sour fruit through all the winter months.
“Fallingwater” was one of the few companions that felt permanent through every undulating stage of grief. It was with me when I screamed and when I was plagued for an entire year by sleep paralysis, when I would wake up, held totally motionless by some invisible force. It was with me when I learned to breathe through these moments, to reassure myself that I wasn’t in danger, that the past couldn’t actually rise up and kill me. It was with me when I realized I was being forced to lie still and look at myself, a phantom I finally chose not to run from or deny, but let it hold me, let it linger above me, let it find me in my bed. “Fallingwater” was with me as I regained feeling in my fingers for good, and then shook at what that meant. It meant I hadn’t died with my husband, it meant I was back among the living, and that raised the stakes.
The truth of bottomless loss, as has often been pointed out by those in a position to know best, is that it never feels very far from a potent counterpoint. A perfect, and inescapable, example, is mourning someone — because their life provides the ecstatic source for the pain which losing them entails. There is a reason why a priest I greatly admire agreed that grief is what delivers us to God — and not only, as some might think, because we are reduced by grief to a state of need, of beseeching. But because when we allow ourselves a total experience of grief, we are allowing ourselves to walk more attentively through a complete topography of God. Prayer, in this context, is less an act of output and more of an acceptance, a closer attendance to the divine spectrum which wraps all the way around us, embracing us at our diametrically opposed, but equally charged, poles.
And although the line between joy and desolation is razor-fine, we are less practiced at building rituals of thanksgiving, when compared with those of grief. We are slower to recognize the beacons of jubilation than we are to name the harbingers of our pain. Lish Ciambrone covers this territory beautifully in her companion essays, parts one and two of “Suffer Well, Rejoice Better,” which examine Bruce Springsteen’s divorce & remarriage albums in rapid succession, Tunnel of Love and Lucky Town. Ciambrone argues that there is a direct correlation between his willingness to plumb the depths on the former and the heights which he was, subsequently, able to summit on the latter. She writes that, “to truly rejoice in life’s brightest days, we must be well acquainted with ourselves and our suffering — and we must be ready to notice the changes as they happen. Secular music provides us with plenty of blueprints for suffering, and I’d argue, significantly less anthems for rejoicing.”
Throughout her career, Rogers has likewise provided, often in the span of a single album, a blueprint for both of these states of being, and I believe she shares in the “uncanny ability” that Ciambrone attributes to Springsteen’s “ability to glance into the rearview as he surveys his present landscape.” So why haven’t I written about her before?
First and foremost, this reluctance comes from the debt of gratitude I owe her — in light of what I’ve written above, I think I’ve offered sufficient evidence that when I say that Rogers’ music saved me, I am not speaking in metaphor. I’ve avoided writing about her music partially because when something is truly sacred to us, it becomes nearly impossible to share. We can’t explain to anyone else what participation in this feeling is like, nor carry them across the threshold to its temple.
But even so, I was able to articulate my feelings about other musicians whose work was meaningful to me significantly earlier than I could pipe up about Rogers. Some were lodestones of controversy, which can lend writing a mighty & meaty tool, but ultimately, it was Rogers’ unstoppable movement toward uplift which made her a trickier subject. She sang in, and about, Alaska, the closest I’ve ever felt to heaven on earth, and about how we had to put up actual fights for our bodies. It was precisely the insistent joy of this music which restored something to me that had felt finally and utterly lost — and crucially, it began to dawn on me that the things which can save us require our participation.
To this last point, it’s also possible that I believed, on some level, that words of thanks are an insufficient response to a gratitude, and words are all I’ve ever had to help me participate in the dance. But maybe this is where the language of prayer and praise has something to offer which a secular vocabulary doesn’t. Because if the same words we use to express loss aren’t sufficient for gratitude, what do we make of the Psalms? In a single chapter, we sing to a God who “toucheth the hills, and they smoke,” a God who “coverest thyself with light as with a garment,” a God whose people “go down by the valleys unto the place which [he] hast founded for them.” Often interpreted as a song of creation, and filled with loss and rebuke, leviathans and oil, resting predators in the thick, huntless heat of midday, this psalm–like Springsteen, like Rogers — speaks to the reality that grief is not just necessary for joy–they actually live together. They are together at the beginnings of the earth.
Rogers’ third formal studio album, Don’t Forget Me, was released when I was in the middle of a new relationship, my first real love since Daniel. I told my then-partner that I was struggling to relate to this record in the same way I had her earlier releases. “You will,” he said. “You just need to spend some time with it.”
Maybe what neither of us predicted was that I just needed to spend some time with it without him. Initially promoted as Rogers’ most fictionalized, least autobiographical attempt at songwriting, as time passed, her interviews started to grant more insight into the fact that Don’t Forget Me was, first and foremost, a breakup album, and maybe spoke more into Rogers’ reality than even she had realized at the time. As my own relationship unraveled, and I began to relearn grief as something that can be experienced even when the source of your pain is still living, I started to hear the album in a way that I hadn’t before. I prayed again, going to mass at the cathedral where I’d spent long mornings at nineteen, and I ran every single day, in spite of what the experts say. I tore through the woods in my sneakers, often to Rogers’ admonition, “Yeah, you better run” — hearing what were likely words of warning to her ex-lover instead as a mantra of encouragement, as I attempted to repurpose some of the endless reserves of energy fueling my grief.
Just like Springsteen, Rogers has the ability to keep her eyes both forward and backward at the same time, manipulating time and pronouns and places, to furnish us ultimately with not a single, limited story, but with the limitlessness of feeling. The whiplash that this dual directionality gave me, this sense of being split between present and past, cherishing and letting go, was so potent that it took months for me to listen to the song, “If Now Was Then,” without crying (at the time of this writing, in fact, I have only managed it two and a half times). There is a moment where we become ready to dream of the future again, and we can’t rush this moment to its arrival, and we can’t pretend that even this new dawn doesn’t devastate us a little with what it means about finality.
In the chorus of this song, Rogers takes the listener on a tour of all the things that she would do “if now was then,” and I entertain myself briefly with a self-indulgent regret about how I, too, would do these things, given the chance, before I have a small revelation: I already did them. When now was then, I touched his chest, I got out of my head, I broke the bed. I loved as hard as I could, and it wasn’t enough to keep us together. In spite of how heartbreaking that is, there is a peace that lies in having done everything you could think of, while you had the chance. As someone who has felt squarely — and, at times, helplessly — deposited in my heartache by decisions that I didn’t get to make, I breathed into this distinction like Maggie has helped me breathe through so much. The reminder that the past is beautiful, but we can’t live there, is strong. If the past eight years have taught me anything, it’s that if we’re lucky enough to live to see now, we don’t have any right to stay stuck back then.
It’s the music video for the standalone single “In The Living Room,” which helps me to understand the importance of a tenet of Ciambrone’s thesis, easily skimmed over: “to truly rejoice in life’s brightest days, we must be well acquainted with ourselves and our suffering — and we must be ready to notice the changes as they happen” (emphasis mine). This is a part of the equation that is easy to ignore, because it’s annoying to have to acknowledge a kernel of your recovered state, in a sea of what is still overwhelmingly grief. When you feel abandoned, you are loath to admit that the abandonment hasn’t killed you. But here we come back to the combined ecstasy and agony which are the water of all divinely inspired experiences — whether those take the form of music, or worship, or are configured to fit under one name, or the same table with people who you love or have never met, or being finally, acceptingly alone, faced with a past you are scared to abandon. And while I’m grateful for the rituals that pursuing a path has given me, and while it’s tempting to think about prayer as some lofty, esoteric act, an ablution belonging predominantly to monks or young widows at the fringe of the Alaskan interior, it’s mainly true we cannot remain on the mountain. The most useful prayer is always to come back to life, to come back to the world, and love what we find there. The water, thank goodness, overruns every shape we can think of to contain it.
In the music video, Maggie writhes around in lace underwear, slams her fist against the wall, cries out in the beginning of the song about how it “hurts to see you glowing,” and I know exactly what she means, having been confronted with my share of glowing phantoms — in a literal sense, the glowing photos which crowded the internet to mourn Daniel come to mind — other peoples’ stories about him, other women’s claims on his heart and history, other iterations of grief we all sometimes have to reconcile, to bring into alignment with our own understanding of the people who live and die with us.
But by the end of the song, Maggie is wishing that “when you think of me completely / I hope it doesn’t freak you out.” Once again, it’s the subtlety that invites me into the brilliance of her emotion here — When you think of me completely. How many of us are able to face a complete memory of a person, and how often do we manage it? Our standard-issue response to heartbreak is to embrace anger which says the person was never worth our care, or sadness which says we were never worth theirs. Be still, the Psalms once again chime in. What if the truth is that everyone brings all of their unflagging worth to every love they live out, and sometimes they still choose or are compelled to walk away?
Rogers follows this with the totally magnanimous, “And when you love somebody new / I hope you say it out loud,” and it’s here that I see what she’s really handling is not an instrument but a camera — with each of these statements she backs up, zooms further out, and by this last well-wish, she’s proving that one can look down on their love from a distance that makes us truly, deeply kind to each other. I see Daniel here now, and on my better days I can begin to see everyone else from this height, too.
But other times I can’t. Other times, of course, the loss feels overwhelming, and it’s like I’m at the bottom of that same great height. I’m on my knees in a deep well, I’m trapped in a dark cellar, I’m prostrate in the belly of a ship. I can’t see anything ahead of me, and I can’t return anywhere behind. All I can do is reach for something directly before me — something material, some boundary of this feeling.
It’s a long night of despair before I realize, placing one palm in front of the other, that I’m not just crawling. I’m measuring the depth of my heartbreak — as one measures a horse, in hands, memorizing its dimensions in my body. How tall it is, how seemingly infinite and yet ultimately explorable, like any piece of lonely land. The size of our heartbreak is the same size as our capacity to love. Rogers and Springsteen know these measurements firsthand, all of us who make art about them and all of us whose hearts break in silence, all who allow ourselves to go down into the deep and come back up, longing and belonging, into the world. Rogers sprawls out on the floor, crying and screaming and smiling, with so much space around her as she sings, that her remembrance can be measured in the empty room’s echoes.
It takes me an even longer time to realize that these dimensions — these walls against which I beat my fists, these floors on which I leave my most pitiable offerings, these pleas for boundlessness or for release — are what make up my most sacred vessel. It’s the ark — I’m talking about a creation myth after all, and my grief is the animal I’m stewarding through the storm. I used to think the only thing that could guide me through this darkness was an image of the faces I still love, but the closer I come to them, the more I see I have to let that light alone, that if I approach it to try and claim it any longer, it will continue to recede from me. We don’t try to live on stars, we just love them. The only true light comes from above, a small window cut into the wood, high above the water, and we don’t peer out of it hoping for illusions, but land where we can find a true house, a place where we’ll be safe and beloved. Maggie’s voice rises on the stereo, a dove wings outward, and I dance, waiting for the hope they both will bring.
A pseudonym was employed in this work.
Lily Herman is a writer from Maryland. A chapbook of her poems, Each Day There is a Little Love in a Book for You, is available through Dryad Press, and a zine, Spree, is forthcoming with BRUISER. Her website is lilyjherman.com and she is writing about grief, like everyone else.
