23/2021

I could not keep the tears from coming. Right in the middle of my livestream this past Sunday, even before I got to the first chorus of the song I was singing, I was blubbering and sniffling. It was bad. It went way past getting misty-eyed. Embarrassed, I almost stopped the song entirely, but I decided to soldier on no matter how painful it was to keep going. 

I was singing “Into My Arms.”

Just the title brings the tears back now. Dangit. Here is where I would normally say “What is it about that song that rips my heart out?” but I’m not going to do that because that wouldn’t be honest. I know exactly what it is about that song. First of all, Nick Cave wrote it and I adore Nick Cave. I think he’s a rare genius — his heart seems to be as big as his brain. I also know that he lost a son. And I can’t help but think about that when I hear him sing this song, because I wonder if he thinks about it when he sings it now. Does he even still sing it?

I have this annoying habit, you see. Whenever I say goodbye to someone I love, I more often than not wonder if it will be the last time I do. You’d think that would make me generally behave better but the surety of how fragile life is doesn’t seep into the corners of my every action — that’s not how most of us function, not until we have really learned it and are truly wizened. My annoying habit isn’t even really about punishing myself with regret about being imperfect at giving love, anyway, it’s rather about — and this is where the song comes in — imagining the person I’m saying goodbye to in their final moments on earth. Is that morbid? Maybe. Is it also somehow joyous? Absolutely. And that’s what the best art does — it makes us feel it all. When I feel it all, I tend to fall apart at least a little.

I first heard the song many years ago — it’s on Cave’s album, The Boatman’s Call, from 1997. But I don’t guess I really heard it until my sister suggested it might be a good tune to record on our first album together. When she did, I ran the lyric through another kind of filter — I’d never thought of singing the song before. I don’t have to believe something to let it rattle around in my brain, but saying it, singing it, is a different matter. Singing comes from the deepest place in me — and what comes from there has little to do with thinking and instead often feels to me like I must embody a lyric completely, so it has to at least somewhat ring true with my soul. So what happens when I sing “Into My Arms?” I become the narrator telling whoever it is I’m singing to that I will hold them in the most tender love, that they are safe to be the gentle souls they truly are, that they’re perfect down to every single hair on their head. That just kills me. And I think it kills me because I watch us all, myself included, stumble through on the daily not getting it the way we want it, always falling short of our own expectations and beating ourselves up for it, and believing we aren’t worthy of love because we aren’t flawless. And I know none of our shortcomings will matter when it’s our time to leave, when we re-become, in death, as pure as the day we arrived here.

I don’t believe in an interventionist God

But I know darling that you do

If I did I would kneel down and ask him

Not to intervene when it came to you

Not to touch a hair on your head

To leave you as you are

And if he felt he had to direct you

Then direct you into my arms

I worried on Sunday that I had something unresolved going on, that there was some emotion in me that I hadn’t processed making itself known through my tears, which was worrisome. But the longer I thought about it that day and night, I settled on the fact that that’s not it. I don’t have anything unresolved at all. It’s that the arms are not metaphorical for me. I remember my grandmother saying once years ago, “Darling, if I could wrap my arms around every one of y’all and keep you safe, I would.” I always knew what she meant, but I can’t say that I knew what she felt until these middle years of mine — these years that are in many ways so sweet but that I also know are so short. In my life, it’s the beginning of my fall and I’m all too aware that my winter is up around the bend. That’s if I’m lucky. I guess mortality, mine and everyone else’s, is always hovering in my mind. But I might need to start to consider that annoying habit I have as less annoying. One of the things we have to do when this part of life comes is help some of our loved ones pass to the other side before we do so ourselves — awareness of our shortening supply of days becomes more and more imperative. We don’t know when it really will be the last time we see someone we love and as we age, the odds stack up. I know days will come, sooner than I am ready, when my arms will actually be the last earthly place that at least a few of the souls I love so dearly will rest their heads. That’s something to prepare for, even though preparing for such a thing is impossible — there is no amount of strength or stoicism that will be enough to keep my upper lip stiff through that song either. My tears will run like a river over the deep heartbreak and ecstatic wonder of what it is to love. I hope I can sing through it. 

Songs tell me things. Thank you, Mr. Cave.

Sending love everywhere,

AM