I DON’T KNOW HOW, or why, but my brain processes things by way of music. My friends call me a walking jukebox – I make it my life mission to pull music recommendations out of anywhere, at any time. When my friends ask if I have any songs to fit a certain mood, I’m always ready with 2 or 3 recommendations up my sleeve. When anything remotely life-altering happens to me, I’m already chalking up a new playlist for a very specific mood. When I’m in the middle of a conversation, I’ll have this strange lightbulb moment where I suddenly go, “hey, I know the perfect song for this!”.
This is precisely the reason why it didn’t shock me that when we first got the diagnosis that my Lola had stage 4 lung cancer, the first thing that popped into my head was not a memory, a specific task, or a face. It was Soccer Mommy’s “yellow is the color of her eyes”.
According to Sophie Allison, the singer-songwriter behind Soccer Mommy, the song tells the story of her coming to terms with her mom’s terminal illness. It opens with a striking image of Allison singing about a loved one’s eyes colored a sickly yellow, a color often associated with jaundice. The narrative proceeds to tackle themes of lying to oneself about the condition, coping from far away, and worrying that time is slipping away. The 7-minute piece comes to an end with Allison grappling with accepting the fact that her mom will eventually die, sooner rather than later. She sings in repetition:
Loving you isn’t enough
You’ll still be deep in the ground when it’s done
I’ll know the day when it comes
I’ll feel the cold as they put out my sun
It closes with a guitar interlude that slowly, surely comes to an end. Before you know it, 7 minutes are over. You almost don’t notice it – I definitely didn’t. There were nights where I just kept this song on repeat, somehow scratching the itch of not knowing how to deal with someone you love so deeply dying in front of your eyes.
My Lola was diagnosed in May. We lost her in June. And in the span of a few weeks, she went from being completely independent, to being confined in a wheelchair, and finally being completely unable to speak because of the pain. It was crushing to watch her shrink with every passing day. She suddenly looked so small.
This was a woman I had looked up to so much in my life, both literally and figuratively. Growing up, she was our non-negotiable. I spent so many days in her house, yellowing wood and all, playing in the garage, or the garden, or hiding in the old rooms where my mom and her siblings used to live in. Being with her meant never going hungry for the day: her bread baskets were never without fresh pan de sal, ripe bananas, and the occasional ice cream we would have to ask for her permission to eat. When the sun shined through the windows, the house would be the most potent shade of golden, and her laughs would always find their way into every corner of the room.
However, in the weeks before The Night Of (a term coined by me and my cousins to describe the night we lost her), I couldn’t find a way to describe the heaviness of trying to accept that sooner or later, that would be all gone. Of course, the moment we were told that this was probably the end of it all, we were the first people to concede. But no amount of repeating it to myself could ever prepare me to watch her gasping for air at 2am. Before I knew it, she was gone.
This is the first time I’ve experienced a major loss in the family, and it shows in the way I grieve. Grief is tricky and fickle. I feel like I’m constantly trying to find my legs, trying to push forward and move on, only to not take a step at all. I think about the sun in her room, spilling through the curtains, touching every part of room that was left just the way it was the night before. I think about how she could barely open her eyes, and the way she whispered my name. I think about how there is still so much but so little left of her in the spaces I know just like the back of my hand.
“yellow is the color of her eyes” starts with the lyric, “The bright August sun feels so yellow”. I don’t know if it’s fate, coincidence, or a coping mechanism, but Lola’s birthday is in August. I keep finding reasons to make the distance between here and the afterlife much shorter. I make sense of black butterflies and white doves. Sometimes, I close my eyes and I almost feel her – like sunlight washing over me. I can almost hold her.
kara likes music 