After Sharon died in March 2024, grief showed up for me as hyper-functionality. Aside from all the estate paperwork, I was internally frantically dedicated to not falling apart. Saying, “Yes to Life!” Was my mantra. I vowed to keep going as normally as possible, not running from grief but feeling it, processing it, sharing about it. I had to convince myself I wasn’t betraying my love for Sharon when I allowed myself to laugh with friends. I did therapy, went to a grief group, journaled, anything and everything to cope. Envisioning this Road to Joy was another manifestation of creating a future for myself I could look forward to. I saw the gaping void of despair and refused to fall in.
In that first year, I kept going with my weekly piano improv concerts and posting to the Piano Meditations Podcast. Preparing the house for rental was a challenge, going room by room and drawer by drawer, purging and packing away the stuff of our lives. I couldn’t bring myself to leave my music equipment, so I brought almost all of it in the van. Once on the road, however, I discovered I would do anything to NOT set it up. As followers of this blog know, I went through several iterations to facilitate making music, but consistently never did. Part of it was a whole letting go of my past life, opening to whatever my new life was going to be, but a bigger part was a nagging feeling of meaninglessness and irrelevance. War, global warming, the end of Democracy, plastic in our oceans and our bloodstreams, man-made extinctions, etc are all crises we care about, and are all also largely beyond our control, save voting and writing letters to representatives. It seemed all of Facebook was terror and outrage, all completely justified. Shouldn’t I be screaming, too? Or is that mere ‘virtue signaling’? But then again, for some, silence is evil, even monstrous. In any case, why share goofy songs when there is so much suffering in the world? I suspended my FB account and went radio silent. I eventually stopped worrying about it and spent my days hiking and appreciating Nature’s healing powers. One day, the music would flow.
After many deep conversations with friends along the way, something has finally shifted. Sharing my creativity, posting songs that hopefully make people smile, is exactly what I should be doing. Something has also shifted in my motivation. I never cared about “going viral” and I gave up on the hope of monetizing my creative output decades ago. I’m done with “career”; now it’s just sharing my life! Several people have said that my journey, both literal and psychological, is inspiring. That makes me happy. It also galvanizes me to continue to live to the fullest, which includes sharing my music.
I plan to re-engage with social media, since, like it or not, it’s the main conduit for distribution. My goal is to share a video with every post. I have some ideas that are particularly silly, where I will happily record myself being ridiculous, but then add music and see how it works together. I guess you’ll have to wait and see!
