The song is Don’t Follow, by Alice in Chains. This song has been a significant song in my life for about half as long as I’ve been alive, which is a bit of time, to say the least. It all started back in the spring of 1996, more than twenty-four years ago. I was completing my sophomore year of college, set to head out on a month-long summer break trip to Europe to see some of the sights with the Notre Dame Glee Club. Just a few days before the plane was scheduled to take off, my family had a tragic death occur; my cousin Paul was killed in a freak accident at his workplace.

I forsook the opportunity to attend my cousin’s funeral because of the plans that I had to take that trip to Europe, plans that included a significant amount of money invested in the trip and my obligation to my friends, responsible as I was for performing at different venues and concerts throughout the trip. My brother gave me grief about my choice before I left, and he gave me grief about it after I got back from my sight-seeing tour. In fact, my brother played the song Don’t Follow when I got back, and he said to me, “This song was played at Paulie’s funeral, not that you would know.”

If you’ve never heard the song, it’s not one that I would suggest that you should rush out and listen to as soon as possible. It’s a sad song, interlaced with some statements on life and its pointlessness. Alice in Chains was not the band that you came out of the 90s thinking, “Man, that Alice in Chains really picks me up when I’m feeling blue.” It seems like the kind of song that would be poetically appropriate at the tragic funeral of a young man who died way too young in the last decade of the twentieth century.

I’ve often wondered how many funerals that song’s been played at, over the years. I know of at least one other.

* * *

It seems crazy to think about it –and I honestly don’t know if I ever have until just now– that my brother died about twelve and a half years later. Looking back on the two, it doesn’t seem like those two points in time were that distant from each other at all; but then again, so many monumental things happened during those twelve and a half years. We both graduated from college. He moved away, to establish a life for himself. I got married, and then he did. My wife and I had all of our children during those years, and my brother –their Uncle Steve– got to know them all, if only for a little while.

When Steve died, I was the family member who did much of the work in putting together the video montage of photos, set to music, that would end up playing at the funeral services for my brother. If you didn’t know this about him, my brother had a tendency to ‘fly the bird’ during the last moment before my mother or wife or anyone else would take a photo of him, usually with the rest of us alongside, so that putting together a funeral video of pictures of him was challenging for me for two reasons: 1) I was an emotional wreck, and 2) so many of those pictures featured his prominent middle finger.

I chose Don’t Follow as one of the songs in that montage. An angry part of me thought to myself back then, “We played it at your funeral, not that you would know.”

During the intervening years, hearing the song Don’t Follow normally either elicited in me a strong desire to flip to the next song, or a melancholic pining to just stew in the sadness of the song and what it has meant to me for so long. But, the other day, on my way home from work, the song came up in my super playlist (I call it the MegaMix), and I neither got sad, nor did I change the song. In fact, the other day on my way home, I had been flipping through songs, looking for something to listen to, and I stopped when Don’t Follow came up.

The other day, on the way home from work, I listened to that song and I smiled as I thought of Steve and our brotherhood.

I titled this post Healing because I think that there is a process of coming to terms with the death of someone, especially when they have been very close to you. While I can’t say whether or not the past twelve years have been a quick pace toward recovery, with respect to how long it sometimes takes others to fully heal from grief, I can say that it seems like I’ve done my healing. This isn’t to say that I don’t still miss my brother, or that I don’t wish that he were still here. Rather, I am saying that the grief is gone. What is left, after the rain, is a reality that I wasn’t ever sure that I would get to.

* * *

I don’t know if this is true of everyone or not, but it’s certainly been true of me throughout the years, and my wife and kids would probably agree –> music in general, and many specific songs in particular, have been significant in shaping the way that I’ve experienced most of my life. The way that music has been a part of some of my most enjoyable experiences, and the way that music has been integral in the processing of some of my greatest sadness, is a great blessing in my life.

I don’t expect that I will ever listen to that song by Alice in Chains without at least thinking of Steve, and perhaps also Paulie, but somewhere along the line, I think I turned the corner. Here’s to the healing.