The Death Playlist

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts – I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll

“I love rock and roll, so put another dime in the jukebox, baby”

If I could be considered an extreme fan of something, it would be music. All music, but rock ‘n roll holds a special place in my heart. I know all the genres, all the history, all the ins and outs of which band plays what songs, who wrote what and when, who performed all the different covers of all those songs, who played at all the festivals… if it’s related to rock music, I probably know it. I’m like one of those old guitar players you would see at music stores when music stores were still a thing, with the long hair and the faded band t-shirt and the faint smell of pot on his skin, who tells you the extended history of whatever it is you’re interested in buying while you’re smiling and nodding politely and trying to sneak away. I’m the (hopefully better looking, definitely better dressed) female version. Except I try not to kidnap strangers and assault them with useless rock trivia. Nor do I smoke pot.

I also love all things goth. Tim Burton. The Addams Family. Poe. Shelley. Stoker. I have the requisite black Victorian living room, a fortune teller-style bedroom, cauldrons in my kitchen, a collection of skulls, and a collection of tarot cards. If I could leave the house every day dressed in Victorian mourning apparel, I would. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been socially acceptable street fashion for 130 years. However, I do have 23 black dresses that give me extensive options for spooky-yet-acceptable looks.

Looking back, it makes sense that I would be attracted to the goth aesthetic. Goth is the intersection of Victorian sensibilities and the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, with a dash of death thrown in, and as a child, I loved all things Victorian and rock. As for the death elements, well… I probably would have gotten there eventually, even if my sister hadn’t died when I was 13.

Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam – Nirvana

“Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam, sunbeams are never made like me”

I grew up in a very conservative religious home. I was the oldest of five girls: me; Joanne, a year younger; Andrea, six years younger; then Erika, and then Kelsey. My father worked, my mother stayed home. We went to church twice on Sundays, daily Bible study after school, weekly youth group meetings, and church camp in the summer. We prayed twice daily as a family and read the Bible together every night. My parents’ religion told us how to dress, how to act, what to eat, what to think. In elementary school, my mother dressed my sister and me in matching homemade dresses in pale pastel colors, our hair in two braids down our backs. Twin 20th-century prairie girls who would do any fundamentalist sect proud (though we weren’t exactly fundamentalists). Like the children’s song Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, we were Sunbeams for Him.

It wasn’t an unhappy existence, though. I didn’t know any other, so it was happy to me. And there were two bright spots in this otherwise beige life: books and music. My mother would take us to the library every week, red Radio Flyer wagon in tow, and let us check out whatever we wanted. We would fill the wagon with books and walk home with our treasure pulled behind us. My mother didn’t put any limits on what we read, so my sister and I read everything. And both my parents loved music. My father introduced us to classic rock -- the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Motown, blue-eyed soul and the Italian crooners. My mother loved folk rock and country: she idolized John Denver; she exposed us to Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel, and Garth Brooks. And my parents had me in piano lessons from the age of 5, where I was learning Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the old Protestant hymns.

The age-old battle between God and Rock ‘n Roll was enacted in my house every day.

It was hard to tell sometimes who was winning. By twelve I was playing the organ for my church congregation, the strains of “How Firm a Foundation” and “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” rising from my fingertips to the heavens… but “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sounds amazing on a pipe organ. One week I told my Sunday School teacher that I didn’t want to get married and have kids like a good Christian girl; I wanted to be a rockstar. He told me I couldn’t get to heaven without a husband.

Apparently I’m not a sunbeam.

But then, something happened that not only wiped the scoreboard clean but destroyed it completely.

The Last Beat of My Heart (Live) – Siouxsie and the Banshees

“Close to you ‘til the last beat of my heart”

I was 12 when my youngest sister Kelsey was born. I remember going to see her and my mom in the hospital the day she was born. I remember her coming home, and being enamored of her tiny fingers (pianist’s fingers, like mine), and her tiny face that looked so much like mine. I remember watching her sleep and wanting to hold her all the time. And I remember a week later coming home from school to find my mom’s friend waiting for us. “Your mom and dad are at the hospital,” she told us. “They had to airlift Kelsey to LA, there’s something wrong with her heart.”

“Something wrong with her heart” was an understatement. I’m a bit hazy on the details and my mother won’t talk about it, but her aorta and pulmonary artery were twisted around each other, almost in a knot, they weren’t large enough to carry enough oxygenated blood from her lungs to the rest of her body, and she had holes in each of the four ventricles in her heart. The hospital didn’t catch it when she was born. Instead she went into congestive heart failure in my mother’s arms and had to have emergency surgery at eight days old to save her life. She spent the next month in the NICU, hooked to wires and tubes and IVs and monitors and ventilators. There was hardly room on her tiny body for all the machines needed to keep her alive. She got to come home Christmas Eve and spend her first Christmas with us, returning to the NICU December 26.

My parents split their time between the hospital and home, alternating shifts so my dad could work, and someone would either be with my sister at the hospital or with us four little girls still at home. Friends, neighbors, and ladies from church stepped in to help feed us, get us to and from school, and watch Erika, who was only two, and Andrea, who was still in kindergarten.

By spring Kelsey was stable enough to come home for a longer stay. Her heart wasn’t fixed, though. She’d come home to gain strength for a more intensive operation later on. For that operation, my parents were given the choice to fix her heart or find a transplant. But tiny hearts are hard to come by, and how does a person wish death on someone else’s baby so their own can live? It was an impossible choice, but one my parents had to make. They chose to fix the heart she had. In the end, that tiny heart was too tired to keep beating, and she died on the operating table at the end of open heart surgery. She was three weeks short of her first birthday.

Bloodflowers – The Cure

“The time always comes to say goodbye . . . and these flowers will always die”

Some of the memories of the days following my sister’s death are burned into my brain. She died on Monday. I remember sitting expectantly at home all that afternoon and evening, waiting for news of the surgery. I remember my parents coming home late that night, telling us she didn’t make it. I remember the hot tears that instantly burned, and my parents’ four arms being barely long enough to hold us all.

On Tuesday, my extended family came in from all over the country, and my parents went to Forest Lawn to plan a funeral. My mom didn’t want Kelsey alone in the cemetery, surrounded by strangers, so my relatives came together and bought all the plots on each side of hers. And I got my first period that day. I bled through everything. It was as though my body wanted to bleed as much as my heart was bleeding.

Wednesday night was the viewing. I remember how tiny her casket was, laid out in the front of the small chapel. It was covered in white damask cloth and lined with pink satin. My sister was wearing her white lace christening gown, her tiny head wearing a white bow and resting on a tiny pink pillow. The room was filled with flowers, hundreds of pink and white roses and carnations and lilies.

Her funeral was Thursday. The church was overflowing with people. I remember neither my parents nor my sisters and I cried at the funeral. We’d been crying all week in private, we had no tears left to cry in public. In fact, it would be years before I would cry again. But one of my aunts, who had been doing her best to make us laugh all week, finally broke down.

And then Friday, it was all over. The day after a funeral is similar in a macabre way to the day after Christmas; there’s so much energy and emotion and buildup leading to the main event, and when it’s all done, everything suddenly feels empty. My sister was gone, my relatives went home, and all that was left were the hundreds of pink and white flowers.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Elton John

“Oh, I’ve finally decided my future lies beyond the yellow brick road”

No one ever says that when a child dies, a family dies. Maybe people don’t know. Those who do know are too traumatized to talk about it, and those who don’t know don’t want to hear about it anyway. But ignorance of a thing is not the same as its nonexistence, so whether we knew it or not, our family died on the operating table with my sister.

It only took a few weeks for us to stop going to church.

It only took a few months for my dad to disappear.

And just like that, life as we all knew it was gone. Gone, like the words of my dad’s favorite song, beyond the yellow brick road.

Forest Lawn – John Denver

“Take me when I’m gone to Forest Lawn”

After my father left, my mother, who married as a teenager and had never held a job, had to go to work. She chose to work at Forest Lawn because, in her words, they had been so nice to her when my sister died. As an adult looking back, I think it was the only way she could be with her baby every day. So now my mother ushered guests through funeral services and drove a hearse. Cypress Forest Lawn was down the street from the schools we went to, so every afternoon my sisters and I would walk to the cemetery. We would sit in the back office of the mortuary waiting for her to get off work, the casket display room in front of us with caskets lined up like game pieces; the morgue with its refrigerated compartments of deceased behind us. If you’ve ever done your homework in an embalming room with a cadaver laid out on a metal slab next to you, you come to view death differently than most people.

I learned to drive in a cemetery – after hours and after dark, when the front gates had been locked to visitors. I would practice stick shift on the ribbons of road that curled among the headstones, statues of angels watching my progress and weeping stone tears as I repeatedly stalled. I would drive slowly past the country church that glowed white in the darkness, past the mausoleum and its checkerboard marble walls, each square bearing a plaque with a name and a copper flower urn grown green from oxidation. I loved those urns; my mom would bring them home from work, and my bedroom walls were covered in them.

I would eventually follow my mother into the funeral industry. I worked for a long time as a funeral organist. I’ve been to easily a hundred funerals in my life, and occasionally I still get a phone call to play another one.

Even death is just a gig.