The Grief Soundtrack

My dearest incurable humanist,

Cars were honking, but I stood frozen on the Manhattan sidewalk. Regina Spektor’s voice in my ears, singing about how it doesn’t get better with time, and suddenly, she was singing my grief aloud.

"I went walking home alone
Past all the bars and corner delis
When I heard God call out my name..."

It was October 2022, and I was walking home alone past bars and corner delis, as Regina was singing about the exact existential dread I'd been carrying since February, when my father died. The synchronicity felt so precise, I had to stop for a second. Noise all around but all I could hear was:

"Why doesn't it get better with time?
I'm becoming all alone again
Stay, stay, stay."

The autumn air was crisp against my face, but I felt suspended in that strange chronology of grief where four months can feel like four years and four minutes simultaneously. I had just moved back to New York a few days earlier, still adjusting to my return, walking to my new home from a meeting at the Harvard Club, when I opened Spotify and saw Regina's album Home, Before and After. What I didn't know then was that Regina had lost her father in April 2022, just two months after mine. We were walking the same shadowed path, and her song became my unexpected companion. You might think it’s strange that, as a devoted Regina Spektor fan (my newsletter Incurable Humanist comes from her song Loveology), I hadn't heard her album until October, four months after its June release. But grief creates blind spots in the places you'd normally be most attentive.

My father's favorite songs had been my first refuge: Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California, and Father & Son. But it was two songs that arrived later into my mourning, that became fundamental to my healing: Regina's Becoming All Alone and Pink's When I Get There. Both artists were grieving their fathers too, Pink had lost hers in August 2021, six months before I did.

There's something about Regina's approach to grief that feels honest in a way that comfort often doesn't. She doesn't promise it gets easier. She simply acknowledges the transformation, because that's what loss is, isn't it? A becoming you never planned to begin.

Pink's When I Get There hit differently when I discovered it a year into my grief journey. Where Regina dwells in the present tense of loss, Pink races toward a reunion that might exist:

"I think of you when I think about forever
I hear a joke, and I know you would've told it better
I think of you out of the blue when I'm watching a movie
That you'd hate, you'd say it, you were never one to hesitate..."

Pink sings about saving up observations to share with her father when she gets "there", wherever "there" might be. It's grief refusing to accept that goodbye means forever. Listening to Pink, I realized I'd been holding my breath for a year, collecting memories I wanted to tell my dad about: finally getting to move to New York, my work as a lawyer, how I was making his tomato pasta sauce recipe for dinner, how I was dating Carlos, or just asking him for advice.

Even before grief, my father had filled my life with music. He had this habit of finding one CD and playing it obsessively for months, the same album spinning in his car over and over. On my first day of school ever, he played Stairway to Heaven during the drive, his hand tapping the steering wheel. "Never forget this moment," he said, turning to look at me in the backseat. "You're starting your education journey listening to a classic." It was typical of him to mark life's milestones with music, to create these intentional memories. Over the years, I became his curator, burning CDs with my carefully chosen playlists, introducing him to artists I thought he'd love.

In our culture, which often treats grief like a problem to be solved rather than a process without a clear ending, we're encouraged to "move on," to "find closure," to "heal." But these artists reminded me that mourning is not a mental illness requiring treatment. It's a natural response to love interrupted.

I've been building a Spotify playlist since February 2022 with songs that help me mourn, evoke his presence, and make me feel less alone in this particular kind of sadness. To me, music is a bridge between the world where he existed and the world where he doesn't. When I hear those familiar opening chords of Hotel California (and I swear it plays everywhere I go now, in coffee shops, elevators, random playlists) it feels like a sign that he's still with me.

Grief deserves its soundtrack. Not the toxic positivity version that promises you will get over it, but the one that validates how it hurts, how it changes you, and how you'll carry it forever. And somehow, in that acknowledgment, you find the strength to keep walking home alone, past all the bars and corner delis, knowing that love persists until you also get there.