My Angel is in Heaven and I am Heartbroken

My precious Betty, my angel, my loved one of 44 years, died March 29, in my arms at home.  She just slipped away in her sleep.

I am still making myself sing.  This evening I sang "Amapola", her favorite song.  I don't know if I will ever go back to singing heavy opera or anything requiring vocal power above a G or G sharp.  I will sing in church.

We had fights, and there were things about her I didn't like (she never understood my obsession with singing opera and was fiendishly jealous of my being around straight men, particularly in story lines with too much sex), but the past three years with her have been a gift.  She surrendered her business to me and her body to her bed, where she just "stayed in and stayed cute".   She smiled a lot, so I know she was happy.

That I will never see her smile again is so crushingly unbearable that I don't know if I can go on, really.

I want to make it to June or July to scatter her ashes in Maine. And conduct a memorial service. After that I am done.

I may not write anything here again.  I may start a blog or an online memory book about her.

Postpartum Depression

I don't really know what else to call it.

The Good Friday service went well.  It wasn't as exciting as I had expected (nor as well attended as usual) and when I got home I felt sandbagged by something I can only call "depression".

Is it because I am grieving over Abbie?  I have not really felt like crying over her loss.  Abbie was not a poignant, sympathetic, tragic figure, similarly to how my mother was not those things.  Abbie really was all the things my mother was, only nicer: cerebral, direct, not suffering fools gladly, hating sentimentality.  She was also someone who would always turn up and "do" if you needed her.  My mother was all those things but she didn't know how to "make nice", which Abbie did.  (My mother would have contemptuously dismissed that as "Southern").

In any event, the loss of Abbie is a loss and somewhat of a shock, but I don't feel sad.  Since she had moved to the Left Coast about four years ago we had not seen her.  And one blessing I now have is, after telling a church friend about my feeling of loss, particularly that I have now lost someone whom I always assumed would be there to be helpful when my partner died, this friend said that if she was "alive and mobile" (she is about 6 years older than I am) she would go to Maine with me to scatter my partner's ashes.

But I am feeling other losses as well. Yes, the Good Friday service went well, but once again it made me realize all the talent I am drowning in.  Although there was one thing of note, a situation in which I surprised myself.  The "boy soprano" woman I mentioned (she is not young; probably close to my age) sang really well, probably the best I'd ever heard her, and I was genuinely happy for her.  I told her it was the best I had ever heard her sing, which is true.  And she had the perfect voice for the plaintive "Agnus Dei".  I think the issue is that however bitter and envious I often am, I am happy when someone my age, who is still working on her art, does well.  Everyone kvells over the young talent.  They breathe up all the air in the room whether they want to or not.  So us older folks, who are by no means done and by no means a "finished product" want our moment too.  Of course the new dramatic soprano was the star of the evening.  Just because of her talent (she is certainly the opposite of a prima donna).  The tenor with whom I have had a relationship that runs hot and cold (I was stunned last year when he complimented me on singing Maundy Thursday) made a fuss over her, talking with his wife on the street afterwards.  On the other hand, her path forward may not be easy.  She has a much bigger and more impressive voice than Little Miss, but she is less versatile and less surrounded by a clacque although she does have a supportive voice teacher.  She is going to be singing a secondary role in a Wagner production somewhere.  I just so yearn to be special, which I will never be.

Easter will be a vocal anti-climax.  I opted to sing the alto part in "Worthy is the Lamb" from the Messiah.  It is a bleeping octave below the soprano part.   I think my teacher was right that the part was written for countertenors, not women.  I probably could sing the soprano part (particularly since we are not doing the "Amen" at the end which has a phrase that starts on a high A) but I didn't have time to sing it into my voice and the dramatic soprano will be there singing it, so to coin a metaphor, it is stupid to put the two heaviest people on the same side of the boat.  So, ironically, Easter, which is supposed to be a high point, will be a low point for me both vocally and otherwise, but then it will be over and I can go back to working on the "Drinking Song", which has a high A in it.  And when I show up for warm up on Sunday I will make sure I have warmed up at home to an A just because I can.

In a more intellectual mode, I was interested to read a quote from Nadia Bolz-Weber in which she said that the message of the Resurrection is that it is an opportunity for people to be resurrected from the graves they dig for themselves.  For me (someone who is totally skeptical about the "Risen Christ") this really resonates.  Maybe I can rise from the grave I'm always digging for myself? I can never turn the clock back and be a teen or a 20something with a clean, glorious voice undamaged by cigarettes and alcohol, making my way undistracted. So I need to "get over it".

Sad News, and Life Goes On

A few days after I wrote my last post, my friend Abbie died.  I didn't hear about it until the following Friday, from her older daughter.  It is all a shock.  I decided to wait to tell my partner until Sunday (Palm Sunday) when I would be at her house.  She took it pretty well.  And she will forget.  There are days when she doesn't remember that my mother is dead, or that her sister is dead.  It turns out that the cancer Abbie had was in the liver and pancreas, which rapidly becomes fatal.  When she wrote to me she used the word "abdominal" which I took to mean "stomach cancer", which is why I was surprised, because that is a type of cancer that many people survive.

Less important, but to me shocking, is that no one has done anything about submitting an obituary to any news outlet.  I have Googled her every day and there is nothing.  Abbie had written three memoirs, a novel, numerous magazine articles, and had a Wikipedia page (I don't know who managed that).  I also am surprised that she hadn't written her own obituary.  My mother (who was not a "personage" like Abbie but thought she was) had one at the ready at least a decade before she died, so that I could send it to the TIMES.  All I can think of was that Abbie was modest and perhaps her daughters (one lives on the Left Coast, the other deep in Trump Country) aren't interested in their mother's legacy.

The day after I heard that Abbie had died, I sang the Schubert "Ave Maria" at the funeral I mentioned.  It went well.  The Good Friday music is going well.  As an aside, it seems that after three months of struggling with asthma and experimenting with how to treat it, it is gone.  Perhaps it is seasonal.  I was at the point where I was using the inhaler every day. I would say that I had some kind of upper airway distress almost every day between December 27 and April 10.  Fingers crossed.  In any event, that underscores why it is a good idea for me not to plan concerts during that period.  And other than florid pieces like "Rejoice Greatly" I think it would be a good idea for me to stay away from singing anything with exposed high notes in public during that period. 

I have the alto line in two solo quartets from the Missa Solemnis.  I was disappointed not to be given the third (and in some ways the loveliest) solo part, which was given to a woman in the alto section with a pretty, small voice (sort of like a boy soprano).  I suppose the choir director wanted that kind of sound at the very end (she is singing "Agnus Dei" which is the last thing we sing).  I do love my solo quartets, particularly "Christe Eleison".  And of course the new dramatic soprano is singing all the soprano solos.  She sounds fabulous.  Having her there doesn't get under my skin the way having "Little Miss" there did.  Dramatic Sop is enough older (she is 30 or 31 and conducts herself like someone older) that I can sort of look at her as a mentor (if I feel like) not an irksome wunderkind.  On the other hand, of course I am green with envy.  There is nothing that assuages the heartache of wishing I could go back and do it over.  1964 would be a good place to start.  Don't smoke, don't try to be "hip", ignore your mother pushing you to be "with it", and honor your talent.

In other (good) news, I finally heard back from the two places I had contacted about putting on a concert.  One is someplace I have sung before.  So I need to get back in my high dramatic mezzo groove.  My teacher will be singing with me and we will probably sing the Anna Bolena duet.  First up is the little mini concert in May where I will be singing the "Drinking Song" from Lucretia Borgia. 

And on a totally unrelated topic, I may be a media spokesperson for events to do with the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. 

Obit

Sadly, I have to report that the man I referenced here has now died.

I have so many mixed feelings.

Why him and not me?  How did he live such that his life had so many blessings?  Talent well used, an ability to form healthy relationships, home-making skills.

I have none of those things and I am still here.  I didn't know whether to beam, cry, or rage with envy when I read his wife's FB tribute. I don't want to recap it all here, as it went into a great deal of detail and also I want to respect their privacy.  But this struck a note.

We encouraged each other and complimented each other. We had very different brains, talents and character defects, but we genuinely loved and respected each other.

A lot of this is relevant because I am shepherding someone through the end of life.  Of course much is different.  He was a man in his 50s who was dying of a terminal illness and was in hospice.  My partner is going to be 83 next month and is bedridden but not "ill".  Whatever else I complain about, I feel blessed to have this time with her.

Did we encourage each other?  Probably no.  We clung to each other and she, particularly, felt   threatened by any venturing forth on the part of the other.  I had to fight, literally, like a tiger, for any scrap of independence I had.  Now it's easier because she's too out of it to make demands.  She can't tell me "you can't go to the Met unless you go with me" because she doesn't go anywhere.  So yes, I will go out with friends.  She has accepted that I must sing, not just in church.

And yet we have always loved each other, passionately and desperately.  My greatest joy in life is to lie curled up by her side watching tv, or to hold her little hand.

I suppose the man who died, and his wife, were just enough younger than me (and the fact that this was his third marriage, and they both came to it as people, not children says something) that he was able to have a relationship with less teenage (or less 1950s/1960s) baggage. You know - stand by your man (or your butch beau) and the worse he treats you the more brownie points you get, because of course, life is supposed to be like a rock song - or an opera.  I partnered when I was an age that is now not even considered adult (25) during a decade when the most important thing for a woman was to "please" a partner, not to be a person. Now people develop selves first, partner later.

And of course I always envied how proud he was of his daughter, as I wrote several years ago. Another example of a healthy relationship. My mother was never proud of me that way: she alternated between mercilessly criticizing me and taking any of my accomplishments (certainly if they involved writing) to be her own.

I have spent the past, God knows, 8 years (since I left the full-time work force) trying to make a rich, vibrant, fulfilling life for myself and not much has come of it.  Something has come of it, yes.  I keep singing better and better.  I realize I will never do anything I even like for a living, but that I can do many things that I like. I can write. I have discovered that I enjoy helping children with language skills. I can live on very little money.  I don't have to travel.  I don't have the money or the energy to turn this overstuffed British spinster style studio apartment into a "middle class home" (read shovel everything out, even temporarily, and have the floors sanded and waxed and the walls painted, not to mention keeping the dining table looking like a dining table instead of a place to keep my electronic keyboard) but I try to say that this does not mean that I have "failed" at being an adult.

Love is love whether you share erudite conversation at a dinner table with a tablecloth or hunker down in front of the tv with sandwiches on paper plates.  I don't believe this man's widow loved him any more than I love my partner because they lived in nice surroundings and spoke to each other like adult friends instead of  like squabbling teenagers madly in love who don't get along.

Most precious of all was the fact that his last words to her were "I love you".  If I can have that too, that is really all I have a right to ask for.

A Slap in the Face? No. A Slammed Door!

When I got home last night after having had a lovely day celebrating my partner's birthday and having our final choir rehearsal of the season, I checked my email to find that this friend whom I had spoken of in my last post had written to tell me basically that she never wanted to hear from me again.  I was speechless.  I have no idea what I could have said or done to prompt that.

For whatever reason, I could sense that she found it inappropriate that I was continuing to ask her for advice about personal problems (like the videos) in the wake of the tragedy in Orlando, but I wouldn't have considered that grounds for ending a friendship.  As I said, she has done this before, although last time I had sworn at her out of frustration, so the reason was obvious.  She has also stopped speaking to other people.  It was the finality of it that stunned me.  I could see her saying that she thought our correspondence had gotten a bit tense, and that maybe we should take a break, unless we had some important news to convey (people do this all the time either explicitly or implicitly) but to slam a door in my face?

Five hours earlier she had called my partner to wish her a happy birthday and sounded very cheerful, and I had written to thank her.

The only other thing I can think of is that she read something I posted on Facebook (she doesn't use Facebook but her daughter does) saying that I didn't think that "thinking" about a tragedy instead of about one's personal problems made one morally superior.  Which many people agreed with.  Or she may have read the last post I made here.

But the point is that I don't see any "hanging offenses" anywhere.  I did not say anything personally hurtful.

So many things now are up in the air, if not literally, then emotionally.  It was her idea for me to have this birthday concert, so I chose a Barbra Streisand song that she likes (not something I would have chosen otherwise although I am surprisingly impressed by the musicianship it displays).  So how can I share my joy at that with her now.  (Whether or not she sends me flowers or even a greeting is neither here nor there.)

Is she including my partner in all this?

I had said (maybe to her) that over the past 7 or 8 years I have had so many losses that it was like one day waking up and realizing that there was no furniture in my apartment.  I think that was why I was so upset about not getting anything for my last birthday. Not that I'm greedy and selfish but because it made the emptiness so manifest.  So she of all people should know that I can't afford another loss, certainly for no reason.

If there were something I should apologize for, I would certainly be open to some soul searching, but obviously she doesn't want to tell me and I am not going to ask her.

As I said in my previous post, I am not apologizing for being preoccupied with personal problems just because a tragedy happened miles away, and I certainly am not apologizing for posting thoughts and feelings on Facebook, here, or elsewhere.  Writing is one of the only outlets I have, since I don't have close friends.  I would never post anything confidential about someone, but that's about it.

Requiem: Further Musings on a Loss

The loss of this coach has hit me very hard, much more than I expected.  I didn't cry over the news, the way I did the day I heard that my 91-year-old violinist colleague had died, but that was a different situation.  I truly loved him and saw him dwindle day by day.  I regretted that I hadn't visited him one last time.  But it was not a shock.

I suppose much of this is about "why is she gone and why am I still here"?  She had a musical career that I can only dream of (it wasn't a big career, but she was always in demand playing for operas and concerts, usually ones in which the singers are not paid but the pianist is) and she had amassed quite a few regulars coming to the studio for coachings, myself among them. So she got to do what she loved on a regular basis and had the respect of her colleagues.

And then there is the mother/daughter thing.  That's a touchy subject with me.  One thing I have to remember is that however bad my relationship with my mother was, most of my friends and acquaintances' relationships with their mothers was as bad or worse.  I think it's a generational thing.  Mothers born at a certain time, even ones who fancied themselves as "enlightened" (meaning in my mother's case that she used the "F" word all the time and talked about sex in a clinical manner in a loud voice in public places) were still quite authoritarian (as in "my way or the highway") and didn't know how to respect their adult children as separate people.  The women I know who are under 45 have an entirely different kind of relationship with their mothers.  They can be different from their mothers and that's ok.  Their mothers are interested in them instead of trying to control them.

I know this is childish and pointless, but I really do think if I had had a different kind of mother (and a different kind of school environment, and different peers - or maybe none; my coach's daughter who is a rising young mezzo was home schooled) I might have done something with my musical talent.  I know character is important, and I probably lacked it until I was well into my 30s, certainly, but most people's successes or lack of it involves a synergy between the person's character and temperament and their environment.

My coach and her daughter adored each other.  As I said, this young woman was hand groomed to be a singer from childhood, but I never got the feeling that she was pushed in a way that she would resent later.  One sign of this was that she was independent enough to go abroad after graduating from Juilliard (which doesn't seem to offer as much to singers, as, say, Manhattan School of Music does, as a case in point, the woman in my choir whom I call "Little Miss Conservatory" has nailed a high profile mentor at MSM whereas my coach's daughter never did at Juilliard).

So again, the question is, why is she gone so soon and why am I still here?

Don't worry.  I am not feeling suicidal.  I couldn't imaging killing myself.  Things are not that bad; there are many things I enjoy in the moment: singing well, reading, going to museums, my favorite tv programs, cuddling with my SO and my cats, to name a few.  It's just that things are not that great either.  In addition to having a perfect life, I always was in awe of my coach's sense of wonder at how things turned out.  She was always not just happy or positive, but "elated", a mood I am almost never in, or if I am, briefly, all the much of toomuchness of twenty-first century New York, particularly here in the lee of Lincoln Center, comes crashing in on me.

In a strange kind of synchronicity, the night I heard the news about my coach's death, Verdi's Messa da Requiem broadcast on Channel 13.  I listened to the beginning, then my SO asked me to turn to something else.  I got to hear "Liber Scriptus", but not "Lux Aeterna".  I think we changed the channel at the point that we had had an intermission in my concert; after the big ensemble ending in "Amen".

I was underwhelmed by the men, for the most part, but of course my eyes and ears were on Michelle de Young who was the mezzo soloist. She sang well (not as impressively as some of the mezzos I have on recordings) and looked stunning. Her very long (bleached no doubt) blonde hair hung in tight curls, her makeup was more for the balcony than for a closeup, and she had on a black lace dress.  As I have said before, I covet all that as much as I covet being able to sing a work like that in a large venue with an orchestra and chorus behind me (no, I would not be interested in being a chorister in a large venue unless I was paid; I turned down an offer to do that several years ago).  It's funny, my partner said she looked "trashy", which I suppose is understandable.  She is obviously over 40, and her hair was obviously bleached and not a length recommended for "professional women".

On a more positive note, go me for being able to hear (and remember) most of the mezzo line when they were all singing together.  I am not a natural harmonizer and certainly had to drill, drill, drill, my part so as not to get distracted by the top.  Which is one reason I am grateful to have been singing with that church choir for all these years.  If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have had the musicianship to sing the mezzo line in the Requiem.  

What I wish now, is that I could find some "takeaway lesson" from this loss.  I am not sure what it is.  Interestingly, at  my last lesson (which went superbly; the big breakthrough I made has held, especially in new art songs and church pieces; too bad I am not 20 years younger with all the big girl rep ahead of me to sing well, instead of behind me with memories of singing it badly) my teacher said that what I did over the past ten years has been important: taking care of my mother (even thought I did not like her) at the end of her life, and now taking care of my partner.  In the eyes of God, doesn't that mean more than having (had) a singing career?