Coming Back to Life

I haven't written anything for a while because my mother died on October 10, and I have been both grieving and busy.

I also have suddenly gotten in a lot of freelance editing, which is what I do to pay the bills. (In fact I have had to turn down work that people wanted back in 5 days.)

We have a good lawyer who will be co-executor of the estate with me, so I will have less to do. I will get less money, but I will waste less time. There isn't a lot, but there will be something I can add to my nest egg, plus a little for my personal savings account, in case I can't manage to work full time for a while, whatever the reason.

I want to say here that my mother died without pain or fear. I spent her last 12 hours with her, holding her hand. Despite her having been an atheist her whole life, she smiled as she was leaving us, and inasmuch as it was possible, she had a "good death", meaning she died at home, pain-free, with no medical interventions to prolong things pointlessly. She died in her enormous living room in the Brooklyn Heights apartment where I grew up, facing the trees.

I haven't felt much like singing. Not because I'm too sad, but because I'm too busy. My mother never really cared about my singing. She loved classical music, but mostly as a spectator or listener. Her thing was language and literature. I want to read, I want to write, and I want to work (with the written word, which is what I do, for an hourly rate scarcely more than that of a cleaning lady).

I haven't done any blogging either here or at the other place because my priorities are work first, then sing, then if there's no paying work on my plate, I can write. (This is a stolen bit of writing, because I have been working all day since 10 am with a small break for lunch.)

Yesterday I went back to choir practice. I am, I suppose, the de facto alto section leader on a Bach cantata. It is going well. I am in a quandary about where to put myself, section-wise, since as a mezzo I'm neither one thing nor t'other. Luckily, we sing a lot of pieces with two soprano parts, so I can sing second soprano. My problem isn't the tessitura (I'm solid up to an A) so much as having to keep the volume down, which fosters tension and undoes all the good work I do with my teacher and in my own practice.

Next month I start rehearsals for Carmelites. It's a very intensive rehearsal period, ironically, right near my mother's apartment, which I will probably be clearing out for the next several months. I have a very small part and it will be memorized by November 29!! And I have a choir solo on the 14th, a nice version of "The Lord is My Shepherd" by Dvorak. And when I can squeeze in a period of vocalizing I continue to use the dreaded ascending phrase from the Amneris/Radames duet as an exercise.

Now back to work!

Above is a photo of me and my mother, taken several years ago at Fiorello's, a place where we spent many Thanksgivings and Mothers Days.