Some other therapists and I are in the middle of a ‘check-in’ and reflecting on our feelings before the meeting begins.
There is a short silence, so I decide to take my turn.
‘I’ve had a good week but I’m feeling tired this morning because I was lying awake for too long last night trying to decide on music for my funeral.’
If a collective worried look can appear on the faces of a group, it does so.
‘I imagined everyone thought about death a lot,’ I say, in full knowledge that most of us prefer not to.
I don’t make a habit of sorting through playlists and searching for music suitable for cremation, but it is something that crosses my mind from time to time.
The problem with music is that my tastes change and, as I tend to become so obsessed with songs that I play them until I hate them, finding one to endure is tricky.
You might reasonably point out that it won’t much matter to me when the time comes, but leaving little doubt about the finer details to those left behind is, I think, a kind and generous final gift.
A day or so later, in a moment of random but powerful enlightenment, I realised I had always been looking for this particular soundtrack in the wrong place.
In her sublime Substack Death & Birds, Chloe Hope wrote recently about how we, in our assumed and overblown wisdom, try to compete with a level of knowledge and order far beyond our own that already exists in the natural world. It made me think about how peace is invariably found most reliably away from anything man has created and instead blows through the trees on the song of the birds.
When I began to look, I could see examples of it everywhere.
It has been my dubious honour to attend a lot of funerals including those of friends, parents, and in-laws but I can remember nothing of the music that was chosen.
My lasting memory of my father is him sitting in his armchair with the French doors open onto the garden. It’s a warm spring evening and a cuckoo sings from somewhere in the direction of ‘the big house’, a residence we used to run past on our way home from school, believing it to be haunted.
When, earlier in life, I went through a particularly unpleasant period of depression it was characterised by an inability to feel settled anywhere indoors. It didn’t matter whether I was somewhere familiar, somewhere new, with people who loved me or alone, the agitation and desire to be perpetually elsewhere was palpable.
During that time, I even found that my dislike of flying disappeared as I no longer cared one way or the other if we suddenly found ourselves hurtling towards the ground.
The only place I felt any semblance of calm was outside, feet wet from the dew and the song of a blackbird in my ears, a sound it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling ambivalent towards whatever their emotional turmoil.
Last week there was an article in the newspaper about the newfound joy of walking outside without headphones and turning instead to the sound of the world and one’s thoughts.
It’s always seemed such a shame that anyone would choose a podcast over the gentle hum of a bee around lavender and the cacophony of birdsong soon after dawn.
I know why people enjoy blocking out their thoughts with Dua Lipa of course. The destruction, cruelty and inequality that humans inflict upon one another and the disregard and selfishness which characterise our stewardship of the land are enough to make any of us want to turn away.
In the end though, however much more deserving of resources any of us believe we are than the snails who’ve been feasting on my infant beans, we will all be in the earth or scattered across it before being subsumed.
I have begun to recognise that music, although I cherish it dearly for the central role it has played in my life, is not as influential as I’d thought.
Music rarely lifts me when I feel low or helps me maintain my precarious balance on the crest of a euphoric wave. Instead, it seems to fit alongside whichever emotion is already present, brought about by something else entirely.
I might listen to music when I already feel good, or it might accompany me when I feel sad, but throwing open the back doors and listening to the wren singing from the top of the church spire is the best way to influence my feelings.
Yesterday, I heard a Whitethroat singing its scratchy and hurried song from the branches of a wild rose. It was beautiful and I wanted to tell someone, but who’d be interested in something so seemingly mundane?
In the film ‘Manhatten’, Woody Allen’s character Isaac makes a list of the things that make life worth living and whenever I see it I wonder how different his list, and our lists would be if we asked ourselves the question tomorrow or next week or next year. Something that can endure as a foundation of gratitude is precious indeed.
The honk of the geese flying in formation across a darkened sky, my dog barking at the air or snoring in the middle of the night, the drum of a woodpecker on an early walk through the forest, or the wind through the trees, are a timeless reminder that I am not separate from the world and grateful just to be a tiny part of it.
A song I placed at the end of an album I made some years ago made no sense to me when I wrote it but, for reasons I couldn’t provide at the time, I wanted to add five minutes of nature sound onto it which we did by standing a microphone out of the studio window on a warm July morning. You can hear a bee at one point flying through your headphones.
For the podcast, I started to record the introductions while on my morning walk with the dogs, perhaps through an unconscious awareness of the inextricable link between birdsong and good mental health.
I left a comment on Chloe’s piece after I’d read the article about people blocking the sound of nature with their headphones and how listening to the birds is the time when I feel most grateful to be alive.
She responded by saying ‘I can think of no better exit music than birdsong’, and that’s when I realised that I don’t have to search for music to play at my funeral.
Whenever it’s finally time for me to go, as long as there are blackbirds to listen to, it’ll be fine.
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