As I publish this I am heading to Scotland for a few days with my youngest son, to visit family for the first time since the pandemic started, and before he starts University in southern England in a week or so.
I’m drawn to a lyric from “I Grieve” by Peter Gabriel, perhaps because, as life goes on, I pay more attention to taking time to spend with family, friends, with people. Perhaps also as the UK is in a period of formal mourning for the death of the Queen.
Earlier this year I wrote “Music as part of our emotional toolbox“, where I wrote:
Yesterday I heard that the teenage child of someone I know well back home in Cayman just committed suicide. No words. And yet… I was also reminded yesterday of an article by Alain de Botton in The Guardian back in 2016: “What’s the point of music? Ask Peter Gabriel“, where one of the key points made by Peter is that “music should, to quote his distinctive formulation, provide us with “an emotional toolbox” to which we can turn at different moments of our lives, locating songs to recover, guide and sublimate our feelings.”
One of my favourite albums is “Up“, released by Peter Gabriel back in 2002. From the beginnings of Genesis over thirty years prior, he had always studied, learned, grown, stretched his knowledge and understanding of music, with “Up” being one more wondrous moment on that journey. As it does for me, for Alain one of the songs from Up stands out in this, “I Grieve”. In his article, he notes that Peter wrote it; “driven by a wish to create a song that would help people with the mourning process. The song has gone on to become a standard at many funeral services, a part of our informal collective secular liturgy. The reason is that the song both knows how to release our sadness and yet also channels and contains it. It creates perfect conditions for a catharsis.“
I Grieve is the song I would like to be played as my own funeral service closes, as it moves from a deep tone of grief to a cathartic, upbeat and uplifting final verse, that begins with the words in the image above, then the musical beat jumps up and the final verse begins with:
Life carries on in the people I meetIn everyone that’s out on the street
I look forward to travelling up to meet family with my youngest son today for a few days, and I always love that “life carries on in the people I meet”