ELEGY

Musical Sadness

         Our junior high band rehearses onstage every morning at 7:30. We are playing Elegy over and over and over until I want to hit someone with my brand new oboe. Half notes, whole notes, whole notes tied to each other. The woodwind section has a consensus that this is baby music. It most definitely is not, but we are in junior high and we know everything. We want to play fast, rippling notes, not this boring dirge music that fourth graders could play. The man who wrote this music is named John Barnes Chance. We don’t like him.

            We have completely and absolutely missed the point and don’t understand or care what an elegy is. We have not mourned and wept for someone who has died. Mr. H made us look up the word “elegy” and come to rehearsal knowing what it meant. Lament for the dead. So what. I’ve never seen death and I want to play fast notes. Death is for old grandparents and people in faraway places who are killed by bombs or tornadoes or earthquakes. They are a number and we read about it in the newspaper, as in “5000 Killed in Managua Earthquake.” I don’t feel anything for those people who lived in Nicaragua, which is a place I can scarcely imagine. Death is remote and incomprehensible and it is unlikely that it will ever happen to me or anyone I know. I have the luxury of these kinds of thoughts for roughly one week.

            Michael, the best-drummer-in-the-whole-school, doesn’t show up for school one day, and by lunch, we find out that he is dead. Something about a freak accident. We whisper, shocked, in the hallways. Death has come to our school. We now abstractly know that Michael will no longer be at the back of the band, chewing gum and cracking jokes. Yesterday he was there, poking kids with his drumsticks, and now his spot will be empty forever. In the space between after school Tuesday and first period Wednesday, he is simply gone from the planet. There is an announcement over the PA system by the principal who sounds very serious. There are whispering teachers in small groups scattered around the hallways. They say nice things to us, like “if anyone feels the need, please see Mr. A or Mrs. B.” but of course, none of us go and talk to them. They are adults and would not understand.

            The proof of Michael’s permanent absence is when we all have to wear our band jackets and go to the funeral home to see him lying in his casket. I have learned that this is the name of the box that holds dead people: casket. Or coffin, which I already knew from Dracula movies. One by one, the band files past Michael, who is lying there, pale and still – and dead. He is wearing his band jacket, too, and when I get closer I see that he is holding a pair of beat up drumsticks. My body sucks in air and an unfamiliar, unpleasant sensation seizes me around the middle. I am seeing a dead person who I talked to just a few days ago. I am realizing with rising fear and horror that Michael, his band jacket, and his sticks are going to be placed underground in that casket for the rest of eternity. They will close the lid, he will be in there, and so will those sticks. Forever.

            Michael’s eyes are closed and he is more still than I have even seen a person be. I want to fake punch him and dodge the fake stabs he does with the drumsticks he now clutches. I know him, I know those drumsticks. Why are they in this casket box with him? I want to complain with him about our math teacher, Miss Reynolds, who he calls Reynolds Wrap and then laughs. I want to catch his eye in the cafeteria even though we are eating with two entirely different groups of friends. Instead, he is lying there in the box under a shiny blanket and his parents are cuddled together in a little bundle in the front row of folding chairs. I smell the millions of flowers that surround him. I look at Michael’s mother who is weeping and weeping, the floor around her chair littered with tissues like so many spent blooms. Her eyes look bewildered and vacant, like the worst possible thing in the world has happened - and it has. People mill about her, murmur quietly. We have the audacity to still be alive while Michael has to lie there and be - not alive.

            I am scared to touch him but I do anyway because I am compelled to feel the skin of a dead person. My bravery vanishes at the touch of his frozen, stiff, drumstick-holding hand. The vise around my middle tightens and leaps to my throat and begins to burn. I don’t understand why I would cry and then I glance at Michael’s mother surrounded by Kleenex flowers and tears leap out of my eyes.

            I grab hold of A’s hand, which is also freezing but it is warm and alive. I feel the stark contrast between this, alive and dead. I clutch her hand and she squeezes mine back. She is not crying. She is apparently brave, but I am weak. I sob.

            A somber, nerd-looking priest gets up and talks about the mystery of why God has taken Michael away from us. We will never know or understand. Michael’s mother cries harder. The priest drones on about God’s only begotten son. I look at Michael and try to believe that he is somewhere else now, like heaven, like the priest says. That he is not in his cold body. I suddenly wonder if he is wearing pants under that blanket. The priest is going on and on about how we will all meet God someday and it requires death to do that. It will happen to all of us, there is no doubt about it. The tightness around my middle clenches. I try to conjure myself in such a box and I can’t. I keep feeling A’s hand, which has become warm in mine.

            The next day, they bury Michael while we are all at school. There is a hole in our school. I can see the vacant spot as we travel around the halls to our classes. Michael’s desk is left empty in English, Social Studies, Science. We talk about him as though he’s just Somewhere Else. At band practice, we play Elegy again. Mr. H suggests that we think of Michael when we play this music and so I do. I think of him crashing the cymbals at the wrong time and how that makes us all laugh, even Mr. H. I think of his mother sobbing into thousands of Kleenexes. I feel a brick on my chest. I start to feel how this music is singing itself about someone who has died and is in a box, in the ground. When the trombones come in on that long, low note, a shiver runs through me and unclenches my chest. Michael, where are you and where did you go and why are you dead? They say he was killed instantly, thank God. Thank God? I can’t thank God, I’m mad at God and we are playing Elegy and when I have counted out my measures rest and it is time for me to hold an Eb for sixteen beats, my lips won’t work right because they are quivering. Elegy. The Elegy is for Michael now. I hope we never play it again and I also hope that we play it in the Spring Concert. For him.

            We do exactly that. Mr. H announces to the audience that the piece will be played in memory of Michael, please hold your applause at the end while we observe a moment of silence. I hope that the music will transfer itself to the audience and that they will feel the terrible sadness that we convey with our playing. Michael’s parents are at the concert and we crowd around them after. His mom is not crying anymore but she looks lost. They say thank you, thank you, and we don’t know what to say and Mr. H hands her flowers and she says thank you, thank you for the beautiful music. She means it, but we all know that it will not bring Michael back, it just makes us miss him more. And yet – the music connects us to him, it’s an invisible bridge to wherever he is.