Allison Graham

I recently heard a song that I found very moving. The song was a single recently released by the band Coldplay. It is a stripped down version of the song Everglow from Coldplay’s 2015 album A Head Full of Dreams.

For me the song is about grief. It’s beautiful and sad and haunting.

Life is short as the falling of snow and I’m gonna miss you I know.

I’m moved to tears each time lead singer Chris Martin belts out the chorus

When i’m cold, cold

When I roll, salt

I know you’re always with me

and the way you will show

and you’re with me wherever I go

and you give me this feeling this everglow

Grief is a difficult thing and we don’t talk about it enough. It seems to me that after a wake or visitation and after a funeral we are supposed to wrap up our grief in a nice little box. If only it were that easy. If you are a working adult you may have three days of paid bereavement leave and then it’s back to life and work and we are left to figure out how to move forward. I have found that grief doesn’t really work that way. It comes much more in waves and can have the same effect as the ocean tide. One day you’re walking along just fine and then one night, all of sudden, you’re nearly drowning.

Recently I have had some friends lose loved ones. My husband’s grandpa also passed away. So it’s been three funerals in two months. Being surrounded by all of that loss has stirred up my own grief again. Most of the time my day-to-day life feels quite normal. Then a song, a Facebook post, or hearing the name of a loved one in passing, or finding out what happened to Jack in This is Us and I’m back spinning in my own grief. I think this is completely natural. I think instead of figuring out how to fix it we need to let ourselves feel those emotions and move through them rather than trying to short circuit them in all of the magnificent ways we humans can find to distract ourselves.

I have also been feeling quite a bit of grief in regard to the social climate of our country. I am scared that progress is slipping away. I am grieving over the loss of the country that I thought I lived in. I mean I am no idiot, I knew racism, sexism, and bigotry still existed but I thought we were shifting more to a path to tolerance. Just over a year ago I celebrated with so many around the country as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states must allow same-sex marriages. What a difference a year makes. I guess as a white woman I got quite a wake up call. Acts of racism and violence are on the rise and I fear that there is much more to come. I am genuinely going to miss President Obama. While I may not have agreed with every one of his policies he led our country with grace and class. He made me proud to be an American and made me feel safe in times of turmoil. He was somehow able to show optimism throughout the burnt out, decimated landscape of the United States following The Great Recession. But after this election I am left mourning over the thought of how we went from hope to hate in eight short years.

But Everglow is also about hope.

So if you love someone you should let them know

Oh the light that you give me will Everglow

I take comfort in that last line.

The 2016 version of the song ends with a surprise twist. Coming in over the swells of the piano is the voice of the late Muhammed Ali. Ali was taking questions from a large audience of fans in Newcastle, England. The excerpt was his response to a young boy’s question about what Ali will do when he retires from boxing.

“God is watching me. God don’t praise me because I beat Joe Frazier. God don’t give nothing about Joe Frazier. God don’t care nothing about England or America as far as we aware of. He wants to know how do we treat each other, how do we help each other. So I’m going to dedicate my life to using my name and popularity to helping charities, helping people, uniting people..we need somebody in the world to help us all make peace. So when I die, if there’s a heaven, I want to see it.”

Part of me feels that his words are exactly what I need to hear at this moment in time. Another part of me can’t believe that these words were spoken nearly 40 years ago because they are so applicable today.

So where do we go from here? I’m not really sure to be honest. But as Kate McKinnon said in last week’s Saturday Night Live cold open, “I’m not going to quit fighting and neither should you.”

I really hope we can find comfort and encouragement in these words as we move forward during this time of what ifs and unknowns, may we all treat each other with kindness as we fight for good.

-Allison Graham