The Weight of Death (Thinking of David Berman On August 7th)

Inside the golden days of missing David Berman

(a cover of “Inside the Golden Days of Missing You” above)

and if the apocalypse turns out

to be a world-wide nervous breakdown

if our five billion minds collapse at once

well I’d call that a surprise ending - david berman

Death is often despicable, inevitable and strangely beautiful. I often wonder why the universe or the human body decided to take away both my father and a hero like David Berman at the all-too young age of 52. Sometimes I think well, they might have endured more despair and pain, so it was best to say farewell sooner than anyone would’ve preferred. Regardless, 52 is still too young, there’s no denying. My hope is that my time on this planet will at least reach the 70s only because the number 7 has always been a lucky number, as cliche of a choice that is. I often would win on roulette with either 7 or 21, go figure. It’s also August 7th.

“Time is a game only children play well,” Berman once sang. Children do not worry, contemplate the future or regret the past. They accept the rules of the immediate moment and immerse themselves completely. They still experience pain and struggle because it comes with having eyes and ears. And I often think the only medicine or probable cure for pain is time, which happens to be undeniable, mortal, silencing. Perhaps the great reward of enduring or experiencing cancer or depression is the prolonged silence that comes with a final exhalation whether by choice or not. No more noise, no more feeling, no more climate change, you’ve been given the gift of death just as you were given the gift of life.

There is grace in meeting the end. I’d rather not just think of it as the way out or the fact that their physical presence is no longer here. In fact, Berman is still here as long as the music of the Silver Jews and Purple Mountains exists. I do think of a time when human beings (or the entire planet) dissolve into dust and what a sad black hole takes up the space that the Earth currently resides in. There will be no more music, no more art, no more human connection. Until that happens, the words of artists like Berman or the kindness of a person like my father isn’t non-existent. They stick around and find alternate sources of output, through me, through others and through the dawning of each new day.

“Previously I thought that through songs and poems and drawings I could find and build a refuge away from his world. But there is the matter of Justice. And I’ll tell you it’s not just a metaphor. The desire for it actually burns. It hurts. There needs to be something more. I’ll see what that might be,” wrote Berman on what was then a music message board. The desire for being at peace is also extreme and very difficult to maintain, which explains why we seek out substitutes, often against our better judgment.

When you hear Berman sing about smoking the gel off a Fentanyl patch and about how things do indeed get really, really bad, you believe him like you would a pastor singing the praises of the Lord. I just never found that spiritual click or perpetual harmony with the church, I found it in the words and chords of musicians. I have a hard time communicating to my mom when I visit her in assisted living, but then I sit at the piano and suddenly I am able to speak through the keys. I have a feeling Berman would identify and connect with a sentiment like that despite seemingly being at ease with words - whether spoken, written or sung. He found a glow in everything. “It was the light in things that made them last,” he wrote in his poem “Governors on Sominex.”

I walked out of the film The Tree of Life once and felt like the world had changed in some way. The same holds true for hearing the record, American Water, easily in my top ten favorites of all time. It’s been 7 years since we lost one of our great songwriters; I still find something to love about his words every day. They changed me as a person like all great art can instill and achieve. Neither gone nor forgotten, David will continue to inspire any and everyone who is blessed to come across what he had to say or what he gave to us with the gift of song - JL