I’m hesitant to spend much time discussing the following two bands because they’re both well-known on the boards and elsewhere, so I’ll focus my attention on particular albums and tracks. I’m also going to split this into two entries to avoid too much text in one post for those of you with short attention spans (assuming, of course, this is being read by anyone).
Last Three Months Theme - Entry Three A: Someone, Oh Anyone, Tell Me How to Stop This
5. The Antlers
Hospice is one of two albums two which I’ve felt an immense emotional and personal attachment. In its beauty I find great amounts of comfort, but in its depths are sparked equally great stabs of pain remembered. Listening to this album is tumultuous for me and because of what it brings up for me it is not always particularly enjoyable – and perhaps it’s the masochist in me – but I find myself returning to it again and again.
I often wonder what it will be like to watch my father die. I’d be watching from a distance, of course, I don’t mean to imply that I’d have anything to do with how or when it happens – if it’s sudden there are thousands of miles of separation between us already, but if it’s a long-term process due to illness or what have you I won’t be at his bedside. I’ll maintain that distance just as aggressively as I do now. After recently unwillingly surviving a suicide attempt I’ve been spending a lot of time pondering the origins of my disease, and as my father was my abuser and the gardener that both planted and nourished the suicidal seed in the stem of me, I can’t even pretend that I would mourn him. It would not be a loss, he would not be missed. I find myself contented by the thought – his ability to ever harm another person being ripped from him in the solidity of death.
When I listen to
Hospice, an elegant and wholeheartedly devastating album that narrates the relationship between a terminally ill, previously abused patient and a hospice worker, I find I place myself as both the victim and the caretaker depending on which ideas of myself dominate my thoughts at a given time. Typical of the codependent behavior that arises from abusive relationships, sometimes I’m the one with my head in the oven, and sometimes I’m the one telling my father to take his out (
Sylvia). Sometimes the lyrics “And as it opened I could hear you howling from your room/ but I hid out in the hall until the hurricane blew” mean I’m hiding from my father’s anger, and sometimes it means I see and hear the pain he’s suffering himself (
Two). By the end of the album, no matter what amount of sympathy I’ve felt toward myself or my father, the refrain “Don’t ever let anyone tell you you deserve that (
Wake)” brings me back to the present moment, in which I am alleviated from the guilt I feel for abandoning my father in his illness, validated for having suffered what I’ve suffered, and empowered by having stood up for myself in the act of running away.
This is not what the album is about. But this is what the album is about for me.