When the Healing Happens
We just finished up a Lost Voices program with a new group of young women, and like all of our programs, the results were life-changing. Even though we’re all still stuck in our little Zoom boxes on computer screens and iPads, the flow of trust and emotion was amazing.
The group song they came up with was powerful, but deceptively simple:
If I Could Ask You For Help
If I could ask you for help, would you give me your ear
If I could ask you for help, even though you’re not here
Facing my fears even though there are tears
You showed me love, even though you’re not here
You showed me trust, that shows me you care
I know it’s my time, to take my risk
And let you fly…
To protect the privacy of the young people in our programs, we are rarely able to play their actual individual songs for you, but I can let you hear this group song. The first track is one of the girls demonstrating to the musicians how she felt the melody should go:
The second track is the final song, with the instruments and all their voices laid in:
When the kids are creating their individual work, a lot of times they will dig into an incredibly deep reservoir of pain. In this last group one of them was dealing with the recent loss of her father. She didn’t provide us with a lot of details – and we never pry about such things – but it was apparent that her relationship with him had been difficult.
That relationship was also very important to her, and they were working on a reconciliation. He had been scheduled to visit her for her birthday. In one of those terrible twists of fate in these pandemic times, her dad was not able to make it for that visit. Instead, he was admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 and put on a ventilator. A few days later he died.
When she told us her story, she did it without showing any particular emotion. She simply gave us a deadpan recitation of the facts. It’s not uncommon for someone dealing with enormous loss of this kind to build a wall around their feelings to avoid dealing with them. It’s also not healthy.
So we invited the young woman who had lost her father to simply tell us everything she could think of about him. What did he look like? What kind of work did he do? What kind of music did he listen to? One of our artists, Kitty Donohoe, came up with a simple musical refrain with a simple guitar riff:
My dad. He’s my dad. Such a dad, no ordinary dad…
Then we explained that we could record her talking about her dad and superimpose it over Kitty singing the refrain. She liked that idea, so we started the recorder.
She started out in that emotionless monotone, telling us about things like his haircut and the kind of vehicle he liked to drive. As she proceeded, though, she began to drift from a simple description of this man to how she felt about him as her father, and finally to how she felt about losing him. By the end, her words were struggling to break through a torrent of tears. She finished by sobbing in agony, “I’d do anything to get him back.”
The recording is so heart-wrenchingly sad that our audio technician who was mixing it called me, concerned that she would not want it included on the CD. I told him that what we were looking at could be an important breakthrough, but that it was a good question to ask. I sent the file to have her therapist play it for her.
The word we got back was that, “She listened carefully to the whole thing. Then when it was over she broke into the biggest smile, and asked if she could have a copy.
We wrap up our programs with a CD Release/Pizza Party, where we listen to the finished recordings of all the songs and celebrate our accomplishment in a happy atmosphere of cheese, pepperoni, and greasy fingers. Even the Virtual version of this party is fun. When we got around to My dad. He’s my dad. Such a dad, no ordinary dad, I was able to watch her face as she listened, with an ear-to-ear grin, and then accepted the congratulations of all the other girls.
Breakthrough!
As I mentioned before, I can’t play this track for you, but I can tell you that I can’t listen to it myself without choking up. But my reaction is only partly triggered by the sadness of the story itself. It’s even more moving to me that I was blessed with a front-row seat at that moment when this wonderful, valiant young woman chose to make this painful step forward.
Because a moment like that is when the healing happens.
