Weird Goodbyes

The new song from The National and Bon Iver hit me harder than I expected. It's worth a listen.

Sometimes I just find myself weeping out of the blue. One minute I’m fine, the next . . . waterworks. The last time before today was during the season finale of Better Call Saul.

It’s not a bad thing, feeling pain and letting it course through you and pass over you and pour out onto your cheeks and into the air. It beats keeping it inside or pretending it doesn’t exist. There’s catharsis in crying. It’s a shame we teach our men and boys that it’s somehow unmanly. There are many unmanly ways to behave, but allowing yourself to feel is not one of them.

I’ve always been moved easily to tears. As a child, I’d cry watching both happy and sad movies. When my parents surprised me with an NES system as a kid (after telling me I was never allowed to have one!?) I burst into tears of joy and surprise. In seventh grade, at our church’s youth group, we watched Schindler’s List one evening and when I got home I locked myself in the bathroom and bawled for I don’t know how long. An hour? Two?

It’s cathartic and healing. Hell, I got all teary in the last episode of Resident Alien, when mayor Hawthorne and his wife had that ridiculously sweet phone conversation. (If you’re not watching Resident Alien you’re missing out on Alan Tudyk at his finest, and you should remedy that).

So yeah, anyways. Crying is cathartic.

So is music.

These days, I often find the two come hand in hand. That’s normal after a loss or a breakup or some big life change. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that a collaboration between two of my favorite musical acts, The National and Bon Iver, has me in tears this morning. (Literally I have to keep taking breaks from writing this post because I keep sobbing. I’m a hot mess).

Weird Goodbyes was released today on Spotify and elsewhere. It’s the perfect name for a song about saying goodbye forever to someone who you thought you’d have in your life for the long haul. Beyond being sad, the act of saying that kind of farewell is just weird.

When my girlfriend and I broke up earlier this year I drove her to the airport and we said goodbye at the drop zone and kissed one another for the last time—like it was a stupid Rachel McAdams movie or a Nicholas Sparks book (or both). It should have been raining. If it were a movie, I’d have run into the airport after her and made her stay, like Dustin Hoffman breaking into the church in The Freshman The Graduate (I always mix those up my head, sigh).

But this is real life and it doesn’t work like that, and there were reasons we had to do what we did, reasons we couldn’t make it work despite still loving one another, and they weren’t movie reasons. They were infinitely more complicated and ridiculous and unavoidable. But it was, absolutely, the weirdest goodbye of my life—a life of many, many tough goodbyes—and this song brings that memory back into sharp focus.

It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking ballad of loss and the realization of loss, that I really wasn’t prepared for when I saw the notification on my phone this morning. Hey cool, a new National song! I thought, not expecting it to be so deeply, painfully personal. (Of course, it’s far from the first time this band has made me cry).

When Matt Berninger and Justin Vernon sing The grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes in a harmony for the ages, well, the grief it gets me. Right there. Right where it’s supposed to. Knife to the heart, as they say. What they’re singing happened to me in real time as I listened. That’s either great art or great timing or both.

I mean, I’m doing pretty good these days. I’m twenty days off the sauce, hitting the gym like a madman, taking care of myself, spending the most quality time with my kids I’ve spent in years. Pwning fools in Call Of Duty. I know things are on the right track. I know we made the right decision. But then suddenly, out of the blue, the grief it gets me and just stops me in my tracks, and I suppose that’s exactly what Berninger is going for with the chorus (and pre-chorus) to Weird Goodbyes:

Move forward now, there's nothin' to do
Can't turn around, I can't follow you
Your coat's in my car, I guess you forgot
It's crazy the things we let go of
It finally hits me, a mile's drive
The sky is leaking, the windshield's crying
I'm feelin' sacred, my soul is stripped
Radio's painful, the words are clipped

The grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes 
My car is creepin', I think it's dyin' 
I'm pullin' over until it heals 
I'm on a shoulder of lemon fields

That image of driving down a long empty road, music playing, rain falling, and just being hit, suddenly, by that sense of loss; and then your whole system shutting down, like a car dying, drifting to the shoulder of your own life, gazing out at the strange landscape that it’s become, just breathing it all in, letting it settle.

That damn image of lemon fields conjures up so many memories so deeply personal to me it’s like the song was written for me, for her. For us. About us.

I don't know why I don't try harder
I've been goin' down some, some strange water

It’s crazy the things we let go of.

Not like we always have a choice.

In any case, forgive me the occasional pouring out of emotions. Life is good and I am blessed and fortunate. But sometimes I’m reminded that a deep sadness has taken up residence inside my heart, like some invisible squatter rustling about the basement, tip-toeing through the attic, lounging in the yard. Mostly he’s a quiet tenant. Mostly I’m able to ignore him. But sometimes I’ll pick up my guitar and play a song and when I hear him singing along I lose my voice.

And it’s not just this or that, not just breakup or the pandemic, not just the struggle of parenting or watching as your children grow up and face their own pain and loss of innocence.

Which reminds me of another song about . . . what it’s not.

Not what you really wanted
Nor the mess in your purse
Nor the bed that is haunted
With a blanket of thirst
It's not the hunger revealing
Nor the ricochet in the cave
Nor the hand that is healing
Nor the nameless grave

Big Thief is great. Such passion. I really hope I get to see them live. I’ve seen two pretty great shows recently, by the way. My brother and I went to The Shins who played here in Flagstaff to a sold-out venue. They played their entire first album and then basically all of their popular hits and it was great (sober) fun.

Their opening band, Joseph (singing here with The Shins as backup vocalists), was also great.

Before that, I took my kids to Red Rocks to see one of my all-time favorite artists, Father John Misty, perform with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. It was a truly awesome road-trip with my children to one of the most astonishing venues in the entire world. Such a cool experience for the three of us.

Life is good. It’s just also really sad sometimes. And that’s okay.

Thanks for reading, for subscribing, and for sticking around through all of my various bullshit, dearest droogies. Much love. Be excellent to each other!