'Shattered' in Grief

Tribute to a fallen folk hero provides solace decades later ...

I was 28 years old when John Lennon was gunned down outside his NY apartment building and I felt grief for the first time. Before then, I certainly had felt the cold shadows of grief, such as when my Uncle Harold passed away during my childhood and when my dog, Punch, died in his old age when I was in high school. But, in terms of the full-force grief that hurts so much because the person was part of you, for me it came on the death of John Lennon. It was a tumultuous time in the late 60s and early 70s, and Lennon’s words, his music, his life were all important influences on me during my impressionable college years. By helping to shape my world view, John Lennon became part of me. So, for a time after he was killed, I felt shattered, and I grieved.

Dimensions of Grief

Fast forward 31 years to 2011 – that’s when I realized that my first experience with grief barely scratched the surface of grief’s vast depths of despair. It was in that year that my 19-year-old daughter Emma passed away. Healthy in every way as far as we knew, Emma simply failed to wake up on Friday, July 8, 2011. (We say that she died on the threshold of her dreams.) For me, for Emma’s mom and my wife, for our family – we not only felt shattered, we were shattered. By all evidence at the time, we were shattered beyond repair.

This summer (2016), we are coming up on the fifth anniversary of Emma’s death and, despite what the evidence suggested early on, there has in fact been some repair to our shattered pieces. Like someone who has lost a leg, we have learned to limp along and compensate for our loss. On questions of “do you get over it”? or “do you go through it”? my wife, Donna, said it best for me when she wrote, “you learn how to carry the grief with you.” And so we do.

My unscientific observation is that the number of ways to process grief is about equal to the number of people experiencing grief – it is a highly individualized experience – and, as all grievers know, there is no magic pill. In my case, I had no interest to learn from others at first – I did not attend support sessions, I read almost nothing, I didn’t google “coping with grief” for answers. I just plowed on with my head down, quietly trying to put some of those shattered pieces together on my own. Yet, now, looking back into the fog that has been hovering over the last five years, I see that there was something that did help me a lot – I found comfort in music. Immersing myself in music provided some salve to my soul, song by song, day after day, over a long period of time.

‘Emma’s Official Playlist’

Emma’s friends provided CDs with her favorite songs, my kids Ben and Sarah put together a terrific memorial playlist, I found Emma’s “most played” songs in her iTunes, others suggested songs that reminded them of Emma – I took all of these songs and added a few of my own – like “You Are My Sunshine” – and proceeded to become immersed, day after day, in the “Emma’s Official Playlist” that I assembled. Even though at first I didn’t know or didn’t like many of the songs, I found that it was a way of surrounding myself with Emma. I figured that by listening to the music I would get to know Emma better and learn to like the songs. Gratefully, it worked.

Of the 173 songs on Emma’s official list, one song has kept rising to the top of my preferences – it’s a simple but beautiful song by Linda Ronstadt called “Shattered.” As you’ve seen, “shattered” has become an important word in my personal grief vocabulary, and Ronstadt’s song captures the essence of my own broken feelings and dreams. When I listen to the “Shattered” song, I am transported to the original raw feelings of love and loss that I felt on the day that Emma died, and revisiting that bittersweet pain over and over, day after day, finally allowed scar tissue to form that fostered some strength and resilience.

‘Shattered’ as a Tribute

Despite the importance that Linda Ronstadt’s “Shattered” has assumed for me, it was only recently that it occurred to me wonder about the song – why she wrote it, when she recorded it, what it meant to her – things like that. Suddenly, after listening to it some 165 times over the last five years, I was curious to learn more about the context of this simple, beautiful song.

And here’s what I found. It’s not Linda’s song at all – it had been around for almost a decade when she covered it on her 1989 album “Cry Like a Rainstorm.” But was I disappointed to learn that? Not at all, because I learned that the song was written by Jimmy Webb as a tribute to a folk hero ... and my personal mentor – a man by the name of John Lennon.

Jimmy was in New Zealand when he got news of Lennon’s death on December 8, 1980. As he interacted with others there about the momentous event, Jimmy noted, “Everybody was just completely shattered and it was like ‘well that’s the end of the dream.’” And he wrote the song “Shattered” the next day, the song that begins:

Shattered
like a window pane
broken by a storm,
each tiny piece of me lies alone ...

In turns out that the song "Shattered" has an illustrious history and was recorded by a number of well-known artists over the years, including Art Garfunkel and Glen Campbell. All versions are good, but no other touches my heart the way Linda Ronstadt’s does. If you are so inclined to have your heart touched or if you are in need of a little cry, go ahead and check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqO-C25MmYs

In short, this simple, beautiful song called “Shattered” helped me learn how to carry the grief resulting from the loss of my daughter and, unbeknownst to me until recently, it was written as a tribute to one of my fallen heroes – John Lennon – a legendary man who provided perspective to me on many things, including what it means to grieve.

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Rod Mebane is a bereaved dad and author of the recently published book, “Tributes to lost children: A snapshot of how 147 have honored their children who have passed away.” He may be reached at [email protected].