Behind the Music
The theme came to me on the day we buried my mother.
Riffs and fragments turn up all the time, that's the job. What was different about this one was that it wouldn't go anywhere else. It kept knocking. Weeks after the funeral, months after, it was still there every time I sat down, the same handful of notes asking to be dealt with. I've never had a theme insist like that.
So I started working, and for a long stretch I got it wrong.
The first versions were mournful. Heavy, dark, a lot of longing draped over every phrase. They were pretty enough, and they were completely false. That music was about my grief, not about her, and my mother was not a sad woman. She was vivid and warm and stronger than most people gave her credit for. Writing a dirge for her was like painting a portrait with the subject facing away.
What finally fixed it was putting her photograph up over the piano.
She looked at me while I worked, and it changed what came out of my hands. The song stopped sinking and started standing up. It found grace instead of gravity. It was the same theme I'd been circling since the burial, but now it moved the way she moved through a room, with a lightness that never once meant she wasn't serious.
That's what she did in life, too. She got me to the better version of whatever I was attempting, usually just by being present for it.
In life and in death, she's my role model. She's my Elegant Angel, and this is the closest I've come to saying so out loud.