I am writing this on the early morning of Christmas Eve, 2024. Christmas has been a difficult time for me for the past 24 years and this year has been no different, but yesterday, it appeared that I had been able to resolve the annual retelling of painful memories and start the journey forward.  Once again, a fresh start for the approaching new year. 

I sat at my desk with a cup of black coffee, opened my journal and decided to see what had happened this time last year.  This is what jumped out at me.

24^th December 2023.  2.24pm

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

I have two very meaningful songs in my life. This, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Gorecki, is one of them.  I started listening at 1.12pm and I came back to myself at 2.11pm but then discovered that this recording had more tracks than I had heard before. 

For all its title and its inherent sadness, it is not so heart breaking as Mozart’s Requiem.  The symphony starts so very quietly that for several minutes you are unsure if you are actually hearing anything, then a single cello is heard as if far in the distance and very slowly moving forward.  It’s strange.  This music is without any doubt “sorrowful” but there is also a deep knowledge hidden within the notes – that of Life. 

Unusually, as I listened, I had visuals.  It began with the first aria and I found myself setting up an old-fashioned camera – the type where there is a large box on a stand and you go under a dark cover to expose the glass.  One of the very early cameras.  I was setting it up to take in picture in a library.  Not a public library, but the private room of an affluent gentleman.  There was an architects drawing board in front of the books and a large wood desk in front of that.  I didn’t see who was to be photographed.  The architects drawing board was, to me, the most prominent feature and as I type this, I realise that this is a connection to my husband Ian who passed from this life in 1998. He frequently used such a board in his work.

I discovered this piece of music around the time that Ian was experiencing his first symptoms of Glioblastoma Multiforme.  I turned to this symphony during the end part of his illness, when I had to work, alone, through the dark night in order to maintain an income and not lose our home at a time when I was trying to hold everything together and also nurse Ian.  I had promised him that he would not have to go back to hospital and that he could die in his own bed.  That was very important to him.

Through the lonely hours of the night, under the light of a single lamp in a large, empty and otherwise dark and scary office, THIS music kept me company.  After he had passed and I returned to working during the day; a time when I frequently fell to the floor, paralysed and in constant, unbelievable physical pain for which the doctors could find no reason, this music kept me company.  I listened on headphones as I played it on a continuous loop.  It helped me to cope with going back to working in a noisy and busy office where there were too many people encroaching on my space and my emotions.

Yes.  It is sorrowful.  But for me it also holds hope.  It tells me that even in death there is life.  Pain can be fought; it can be experienced, acknowledged, accepted, and life will continue.  It’s a hard lesson and one that every person who has lost someone they love will experience.  The person leaves, they continue.

The music swells in waves.  It takes the listener on a roller coaster of emotion from the deepest sorrow to the gentle beauty that can be seen in a field of flowers.  Life within death.

There is a pause where I understood the symphony to end, but then two more sections came.  These were chaotic.  Where every instrument was playing out of tune yet the whole was focused.  Not pleasant, but listenable.  I understood this as the emotional chaos that precedes death and continues until it is time to be released. 

For me, having just emerged from my annual melt-down – my time of chaos – over the cause of my Christmas being spent alone, this writing from last year about a piece of music which fills my heart with the deepest, most profound emotion a human can experience – that of Life within Death and Death within Life, has shown me the way forward.  It IS sorrowful to lose a loved one, and even when a loved one still walks the earth, but there is no contact between you, it is still a form of death.  We grieve, yet life continues in all its wonderful discordant, chaos. 

In just eight days from my writing this post, we will step into another year – a year which, for many, will be filled with discord, chaos, and pain.  Listen to Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, allow yourself to float in the emotions that you hold so tightly bound in your heart. Release the tensions, pains and pressures of the past, and step into the future – however chaotic you believe it will be.  Look beyond the chaos, to the still, calm centre, and know that we, humanity, will flourish beyond this time.

Thank you for reading

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Auri’An Lay

Life through a neuro-divergent mind