The sound of silence

 My boyfriend Justin and I were driving the other day. A song he liked came on the radio so he turned it up. I told him I loved this song too, so he turned it up even loader. A seconded later we had all the windows down and the music up as far as it would go, singing with it at the top of our lungs like we were some crazy teenagers. Dancing with it as much as we could in a car.  After a couple songs we turned it back down and became grown ups again. 

"That was fun" I said. "I haven't done anything like that in forever"

"really" he looked puzzled. "You don't turn the music in the house up really loud and dance around with your kid." 

"No we don't do that. She doesn't like loud things." I replied.

Still in disbelief he said "My kids love dancing around the house to loud music. I pick them up and spin them and play them like their air guitars"

"Ya we don't do stuff like that"

I thought about it. We used to do that. Long ago and far away in another life with a silly playful daddy. We used to dance around the house all the time. Her and Dan even had a 'routine' to their favorite song. She would be sure to tell him if he forgot a step. It feels like a whole different life, maybe it was?

Silence is what came when Dan died. Everything just went silent. The noise left with him. That's a funny thing to put in the list of grief things, the eerie quite that was now everywhere. Quietness is part of grief, the part nobody hears. Our house used to be so loud, in a good way; music, playing, dancing, friends, life everywhere. Dan always liked to tease me that once I 'got in a bar fight' when we were at a concert together. I didn't, I bumped into someone and they fell over, but Dan always had a flare for story telling. Then the melody that was always in the background stopped.

When I recall the night Dan died, it is always accompanied by noise. Mostly noise you can't really make out. I can hear my feet running down the hall. The thump of Dan's body as I pulled it off the bed onto the floor. I can hear the rustling of the paramedics jackets. I hear a lot of 'white noise' just a kind of whooshing, it muffles actual words, those are there but they are hard to make out, I want to say "what did you say" to my memory.  

Then it stopped. The noise stopped, it was eerily quite. No one said the words "Dan died" what they told me is we wouldn't be going to the hospital. I was sitting on the floor in the doorway of my kitchen. We wouldn't be going to the hospital, there was no reason to, Dan was dead. That's when the silence came in.

Have you ever watched a movie or T.V show where they have taken out the background music for dramatic effect? A great example of this is in the tv show 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' The episode titled Hush. Not only is their no talking in the entire episode but their is no noise. No background music. The only things you hear are things like a door slamming, or a book dropping on the floor. Other then that theirs no noise. This is what it felt like immediately after Dan's death and the weeks/months that followed. People talked of course but their was no background noise, just silence.

The silence came for my Baby Girl too, though I can't say when it hit her. She just wasn't loud anymore, she didn't have any background noise either. She used walk around the house with a little hop in her step (a trait she got from her father) singing or humming everywhere she went. That was gone. She barely made nose when she moved around the house. She used to talk your ear off about a thousand different things. Before Dan died and we would drive somewhere it was guaranteed that she was going to babble on the entire ride, I remember wishing just for five minutes of peace and quite. Well I got it, just had to have her dad die. Talking became very rare and it was mostly when she needed something.  The only time she ever made any real noise was when she was having a grief tantrum. She screamed and yelled her heart out, I guess she opted to get it all out at once.

We would sit on the couch and watch TV for hours without saying a word to each other. I guess neither of us had the energy for talking. We would drive in the car not saying a word, not even listening to the radio. If I tried turning it on she would say "turn it off turn it off it's to loud" no matter how low it was. I got in the habit of just driving in silence, we still do that when were together. The music died with Dan.

So what was the song Justin and I were listening to; It's a 90's head banger song called 'My own worst enemy" by Lit. I'm a 90's girl what can I say. Dan would have danced to it too. If he were here.

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here.