Not Fade Away: A personal reflection on the healing power of art and music during moments of life and loss

Let’s say it plainly; loss sucks. It’s a unique kind of pain that we feel when a part of our story, our identity, slips away from us. This can occur when we lose a job, a relationship ends, or when someone dies. That pain, though totally subjective, is one of the universally human parts of our existence here on Earth. We even see animals mourning the loss of their own. Whatever the subjective uniqueness to the loss we face, music and art have helped us, perhaps since the very beginning of our collective story, to process it, and find a new normal after the loss. In this post, I’ll speak mainly about my experience with it over the course of my life.

Zaatar et al. (2023) note that music can be thought of as a universal language that can bring about profound emotional and cognitive responses. Why is this important? As I read through research on this, it makes me see that music can become something else, a channel to access feelings that we might have not been able to access without it. Certainly, as someone who has held a lifelong love of music, I can attest that music lifts me at times, comforts me at others, and ties me to people, places, and times in my own story as I’ve moved through the world.

This brings me to the Grateful Dead. Now, before you click away, hear me out. I get that a lot of people have a wide variety of opinions about this band, known by many as the universe’s main source of tie-dye, LSD use, and sixties hippies. People often think of the band, its fans, and of the music itself, as sunshine hippie music best kept to fields and riversides at festivals. It might be some of that, no argument, but it’s infinitely more if you can sift through the surface. The Grateful Dead taught me a lot about life. There’s that surface level of feeling it’s all sunshine and tie-dye, but if you listen to the lyrics, it’s beautiful music telling us terrible things. A lot of this music is about death, about loss. It’s part of why they chose the name the Grateful Dead, mythologically connected with the Egyptian book of the dead. These songs are about loss, hurt, and regret. This is music for life, the whole life, that contains beauty, and sorrow, and everything in between life and death.

Because the Grateful Dead, in its various incarnations since the 1960s, and its fans, the Deadheads, have persisted across over half a century, the music, and their live shows have become multi-generational experiences. I’ve seen people at these shows with their kids and grandkids, and each generation takes something different, yet equally profound from the experience. Now in my 40s, this music means something different to me than it did in my teens when I was first introduced to them by my family. The sounds of these men from San Francisco echo out of speakers to me, even though their leader Jerry Garcia died when I was still a pre-teen. 

Many people say that going to a Grateful Dead show felt more like going home than it felt like a concert. It was an instantaneous community that many carried forward into their future lives, changed forever by music beaming out from a spotlit stage, and a warm, welcoming crowd dancing and singing around them. It’s an almost unthinkable phenomenon that music can create such bonds between us. It’s also one of the most powerful human experiences that we can derive meaning and connection from a musician on a stage that’s singing songs about their experience, and yet feel such profound resonance in our own stories, even though this person singing or playing an instrument has never met us. Scott Hutchison, the lead singer of the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit, once thought his music was being taken to heart by his fans, so he attempted to make his songs more and more personal and specific to his experience, but the reaction he noted was that the more he did this, the more it resonated with people in their own stories.

Most people I’ve met would agree that music heals. Music as therapy continues to gain traction in mainstream medical science. While music therapy now stands proudly on it’s own, I think there is more work to be done on using music as individuals, to help us process emotions and make sense of our realities. There is growing research that has shown promise in how listening to music, or playing music with others can create and foster a safe and supportive environment for healing, whether that’s decreasing anxiety, improving functioning for people struggling with depression, and helping people heal from the effects of trauma. I can see this in my life as well. The years I spent working as an ambulance paramedic left me with more trauma than I knew what to do with, and much of my early healing and improvements in how I functioned and lived was due to music.

Ageing affects music as well, whether we want it to or not. The grunge rock of the 90s now speaks to me as this relic of my turbulent adolescence. The Beatles make me think of being a small child in my mother’s arms. I’ll always remember that Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’ and the Grateful Dead’s ‘Ripple’ were songs that I rocked my son to sleep to when he was a baby in my arms. Music changes us, but it also changes in our interpretations of the same thing, almost as if the song itself is a fluid, ever-changing thing that changes along with us as we move through life. When I met my spouse in my late 20s, I was already a Deadhead, and my spouse was decidedly not, but they were a John Mayer fan. As fate had it, and as weird and as wild as it may seem, in 2015 John Mayer joined the Dead and formed Dead and Company, a band that lasted until this year when Bob Weir passed. This created a fusion, and in the years since, John Mayer led my spouse into becoming a deadhead even as he became one himself.

That’s a lesson I’ve learned through the Grateful Dead that has helped me tremendously in my life. Change is an inevitable and permanent part of mortal existence, and the only way to move through it is to embrace it and try our best to ride the wave. Change was always a key part of the Dead’s music. There were so many versions of the band over the decades as people died and left and new voices joined, but the music itself was always changing due to the band’s unique nature of being based in improvisation, or jamming. When I relate this back to grief, it can be thought of as the pain associated with these changes in our lives through loss. Because of that, I endeavour to remain open to change without resistance, so that I can flow with the changes that come about in life.

As a counsellor now, I am passionate about finding ways to help people heal and grow that work for them in their lives, not what I, or others in the medical field, might assume will help them best. It was once famously said that the Grateful Dead were like licorice; not everyone likes licorice, but those who do tend to like it a lot. I’ve ruminated on that description on many fronts over the years including with regard to myself when depression, anxiety, or my inner critic wanted to tell me that people around me didn’t like me. I’ve learned that it’s okay to be licorice. I think that’s one of the best things I’ve learned from music, that it’s okay to be me, that things are going to be okay in general. Music feels like hope for me, and as Scott Hutchison sang “I still have hope so I think we’ll be fine in these disastrous times.