Composed Page 15

  She died on Tuesday, May 24, almost to the hour of the moment she gave birth to me fifty years ago. She completed a magnificent circle, in perfect symmetry. She had a career as a mother of exactly fifty years, to the hour. She let us know, in no uncertain terms, that she defined herself as a mother, that it was her great passion and her proudest accomplishment, and we will never be allowed to forget that, because her passing is permanently linked to the moment she became a mother. It is written in stone now. It is written in our hearts, as well. I feel humbled by the distinction and the honor that my mother’s soul was born into heaven on the day I was born into the world. And I also know she’s saying, “I did my job, baby. Fifty years is long enough. Time for me to rest, now.”

  An old Eskimo poem reads: Perhaps the light in the sky is not stars,

  but rather openings in heaven

  where the love of our lost ones pours through

  and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.

  I will spend the rest of my life standing under the stars to feel her happiness, and her love. And on those nights which are dark, devoid of available light, I have only to look to the ground to see her presence, in the roses and hibiscus, the hedges and the vines, the flowering plants and everything green and blossoming that grows in the earth, that she loved and touched and made to grow, just like my sisters, just like me.

  The eulogy was too sentimental for my taste, but then, so at times was my mother.

  Whenever I see a sky full of pink and gold, I always wonder how it would look at the ocean—specifically, at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett, on Long Island. Shortly after my father died, I went there, still cracked open and hurting, with my son, Jake. It was late afternoon, with the sun very low on the horizon and the sky full of big, important-looking black clouds. The beach was empty except for a few teenagers hanging out by the lifeguard’s stand, energized by the coming storm. Occasional beams of white sunlight came through the narrow alleys between the clouds and caught the tips of the waves, making them shine and the sand glow for just an instant. Ahead of me, Jake was singing to himself and skipping alongside the edge of the water, in a kind of side-to-side way, his arms out and his little gangly legs trying to keep in rhythm with the rest of his body. Heavy with sadness, I looked up to see his little body akimbo, moving like a stuttering windmill, oblivious to the impending storm, in perfect happiness. I stopped cold. This is how my dad lives on, I thought. Actually, I didn’t even think it—I just heard the words: This is how he lives on.

  I did not have many epiphanies like this after my mother died. The grief I felt for her was a blow and a grind, a dullness that fell over my waking hours and left me numb and sleepless through the night. I could not seem to shake myself into alertness from the shock of her loss. The loss of my dad, in contrast, was all sharp angles and revelatory thoughts, transformative power and energy, and gut-wrenching sorrow. I had expected his death. For almost a decade I had traveled to his hospital bed again and again, watching helplessly as he weathered catastrophic infections, terrible setbacks, and an alarming decline over the five years preceding his death. In some way this had enabled me to prepare myself. In the months after his death, I lost fifteen pounds just from moving the energy of his loss through my body. With the emotional and mental incoherence I faced after the passing of my mom twenty months later, I gained it all back.

  I have taken every sorrow of my life to the ocean—the deaths of my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, friends who died untimely deaths, my stepsister Rosey and my best friend from eighth grade, the baby that never came to term, the broken relationships, divorce, the terror of the addictions of those I love—I have taken all of it to the sea. I have performed many rituals of release while immersed in salt water or walking on the shore. The ocean, for me, is what those in twelve-step programs call a Higher Power.

  Looking back, I see that what I regarded as templates were merely incidents in a long life, and the only crippling potential they possessed was that which I gave them. There is not meaning in everything, but one can ascribe meaning to anything. Therein is the beauty. I gave an old man the pleasure of thinking he had introduced me to birds, by being deceptively innocent, by acting a part, but I was wrong in thinking I had to live the rest of my life that way. I watched the mountain around my childhood home burn to cinders, not realizing I was taking particular and meticulous note of exactly what I did not want for my future, in geography, climate, and community, and so, eventually, I moved to New York City, my true home. The guitar was taken, but the stolen jewelry was returned by a more loving source. I was flagged in the customs watch list, but from then on I declared everything, and not just the clothing I purchased. “I declare”: a great Southernism, and a poetic way to live. I never went into a house through a window again, and afterward so many doors were opened to me. Thirteen years after the Magic Castle, I got a divorce, but I got four daughters, and I learned how to be a mother to daughters; then I remarried and learned how to be a mother to a son. I got off the plane, and avoided the hurricane.

  I had lost my parents. There was no ultimately fortunate conundrum there, or if there was, I hadn’t yet come to perceive it. But the footsteps of a little dancing boy cast long shadows, and pointed to new futures, where there are no templates, and dissembling and deception are not required.

  In the last year of my dad’s life, all his organ systems started failing. He was ravaged by diabetes and neuropathy, which was complicated by various other ailments that arose from a lifetime of hard living. He had very little healthy lung tissue left because of dozens of bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis during the previous decade. Several months before he died, he had a bad time with his feet, due to complications of the diabetes, and for a time it looked as if a toe might have to be amputated. I was aghast, and concerned that this would plunge him into a depression. I carefully asked him how he felt about it and if he was anxious about the possibility of losing a toe. He scoffed, “Nah, the one they want to take off is my least favorite toe.”

  It was in early 2003 that I began to lose a lot of people close to me in a very short time, starting with my aunt Louise, my father’s elder sister and the matriarch of the Cash family since the death of my grandmother. Around the time of her passing, I wrote the song “Black Cadillac.” The words and music both came quickly, and when I finished it, a chill came over me when I realized that it wasn’t actually about Aunt Louise, but about my father. I had had the experience earlier of writing myself postcards from the future. Creative work sometimes fosters a prescience—not a psychic premonition, but rather a release from linear time, a fluidity of movement on the continuum. I knew that “Black Cadillac” had been inspired from somewhere other than the present, and that realization paralyzed me with fear.

  The following month, on May 15, June died, quite unexpectedly. We children held our breath throughout that spring and summer. We did not expect my father to survive that loss, as his health had already become so compromised. In August, I went to Cam-bridge, England, to play at the folk festival there. On a day off I climbed to the top of a church tower with Chelsea, who had accompanied me, John, and Jake to England. We looked out over the River Cam, and I had an uncanny vision: I saw the water rise up to the top of the church tower and myself and Chelsea sailing off the tower, as if we had wings. I started writing “Dreams Are Not My Home” that day with a sick foreboding.

  The waves are breaking on the wall

  The queen of roses spreads her arms to fly, she falls.

  If I had wings I’d cut them down

  And live without these dreams so I could learn to love

  the ground.

  I want to live inside the world

  I want to act like a real girl

  I want to know I’m not alone

  And that dreams are not my home.

  When I got back to the States in mid-August, Jake and I went to see my dad. My sister Cindy had spent a few weeks with him that summer and had just left. I kne
w Dad wanted company, and I was anxious to check on him. By now he was in a wheelchair, consumed with grief and physical pain. For most of the day I would sit in his little office off the bedroom and watch the news with him—I offered to buy him a new television, a flat-screen, and he agreed that it was time to trade the old one in—or read to him. I read the Book of Job, and the Psalms, and the poetry of Will Carleton, one of his favorites. I made myself get up at three thirty in the morning, when I knew he would wake, and make coffee for him, black, with artificial sweetener. (He had finally accepted the fact that he was diabetic and gave up sugar.) During these few precious hours alone in the mornings, the house was quiet and we could really talk. We would turn on CNN and discuss that day’s world events, and then he went back to sleep for an hour or so until six, when the staff arrived. In the afternoons, Jake would sit at Dad’s desk and draw pictures of Power Rangers for his grandpa. Dad would hold the drawings up to look at them and exclaim, “Power Rangers!” delightedly.

  Late in the afternoon of the day before I left to go back to New York, Dad stared out the window at the lake and said sadly, “The gloaming of the day is the hardest part.” I said I knew that it was. His head tilted down to his chest. “I feel so bad,” he said, and that was one of the only times in my life—maybe the only time—that I ever heard him complain about his ailments. It was extraordinary, and shocking, to see his stoic resolve crumble before my eyes. “I know, Dad,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  The next afternoon I went to hug him and tell him good-bye. Dad looked at me, surprised. “I didn’t know you were leaving today,” he said. I reminded him that I had told him I had an early evening flight to New York. “But I thought you were going to have coffee with me tomorrow morning,” he said, his confusion evident in his face. My heart ached, but I pushed the feeling aside. “No, Dad, I have to go,” I said. “But, remember, you’re coming to New York for the MTV awards in a couple weeks, right?” “Oh, yeah,” he said, and nodded. He had said that he was determined to attend the awards, as he had a few nominations, and he was going to work with a physical therapist that his producer, Rick Rubin, had recommended to help him regain his strength and get back on his feet. I could see now that he didn’t actually believe he would be able to make it. His surrender alarmed me, but I pushed that feeling aside as well. I got to the airport and discovered that the blackout of 2003 had stricken New York City and much of the Northeast, and my flight was delayed indefinitely. I called Dad to ask him what CNN was saying about the blackout, and after we considered my options, I decided to wait at the airport. My flight was ultimately canceled, and I was rescheduled for one early the next morning. I debated whether to drive the forty miles back out to Dad’s and spend the night, which would have meant leaving there the next morning at five a.m. I decided instead to check into an airport hotel, but I didn’t tell Dad, knowing how disappointed he would be if I didn’t come back to the house. It turned out that I waited at the airport most of the following day and didn’t get on a flight until late that afternoon.

  On September 11, I got a call from Phil Maffetone, Dad’s physical therapist, to discuss his treatment and how he could build strength. At the time Phil was in the bedroom with Dad, and he suddenly stopped in the middle of our conversation to say that something was happening with Dad. Phil became alarmed and promised to call me back. An ambulance came. John Carter and his wife, Laura, phoned me from the hospital. “You’d better come,” Laura said quietly. I booked the next flight, which left me only an hour to reach Newark Airport. I was beside myself with anxiety, as it was still rush hour and I knew the Holland Tunnel would surely be packed with commuters. I got a taxi, and when we reached the tunnel we discovered that it was completely empty. The driver turned fully around in his seat and stared at me in shock, as if I had something to do with it. “I’ve never seen it like this,” he said. “Maybe because it’s the anniversary of 9/11,” I offered.

  When I arrived at the hospital at around ten p.m., Dad was still conscious. He squeezed my hand and lifted his eyebrows to let me know that he could hear me when I spoke to him. After a few hours, everyone left except for my sister Kathy, John Carter, and me. John Carter went to lie down somewhere, and Kathy and I went across the hall to an empty ICU room. I fell asleep in a chair and awoke to the sound of Kathy crying and a nurse gently tapping my arm. We went across the hall to Dad. I sang “The Winding Stream” into his ear, and he struggled for a half hour more. He died at 1:20 a.m., September 12. I held his hand for a long time after, and the nurse cut a lock of his hair for each of us children.

  We had to wait a few hours for officials to come and sign some papers, because of a rule about the verification of the cause of death of someone who has been in the hospital for less than twenty-four hours. Kathy finally went home, and in the early morning hours John Carter and I followed our father’s body as it was wheeled through the labyrinthine basement recesses of the hospital. “It’s like we’re going to the stage,” John Carter said suddenly, and the connection struck me as eerily similar and exquisitely, painfully beautiful: All of us children had followed Dad so many times through the backstage halls and mazes and basements of arenas as he made his way to the stage. He would have loved the metaphor.

  I got about three hours of sleep, between three and six a.m., and then I started watching the clock. I was at peace with the fact of that day, a day on which he was still alive, albeit briefly, and I was dreading midnight, when it would become September 13, the first day on which he would be dead forever. On Friday, September 12, air had still gone in and out of his lungs; he had moved his limbs and made sounds. He had actually squeezed my hand and lifted his eyebrows. It was a difficult day, the last day of my dad’s life, but not unbearable to me. The next day, the beginning of my dad in the past tense, was unbearable.

  Six weeks later, when my stepsister Rosey died of carbon monoxide poisoning, I started writing the rest of the songs that would become Black Cadillac, out of a near-desperate need to control something in my universe amid the tidal wave of loss that seemed to keep rolling over my family. The first song I wrote after my dad’s death was “God Is in the Roses,” followed shortly by “The World Unseen,” the opening line of which was a reference to Psalm 102, which Dad so loved and which I’d read to him several times in the last few months of his life: “I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop.” In my song, the image became, “I’m the sparrow on the roof / I’m the list of everyone I have to lose.”

  It was after composing “The World Unseen” that I realized I was writing a concept record. John encouraged me to keep the lyrics grounded and somewhat literal, to focus on the houses and the birds and the waves and bells and roses, to describe the artifacts of grief rather than the specific feelings. In the midst of mourning, I had to be reminded to stay away from what I had always considered anathema to great songwriting: big themes. John wrote the music for four of the songs.

  I wanted to start recording, with John as producer again, but he was in the midst of another project and it was taking months longer than we had anticipated. Julian Raymond, my A&R person, called with an idea: Would I be willing to work with Bill Bottrell, a record producer and guitarist who had a deep affinity for roots music, and let him produce a few songs? If it didn’t work, I could back up and wait for John, but if it did, we could record five songs and get a head start on the project. I agreed and sent Bill a few of the songs. We did some basic preproduction, but the arrangements were still pretty much up in the air when I went to Los Angeles to work with him and the band he had put together: Dan Schwartz on bass, Brian MacLeod on drums, my old friend Benmont Tench on keyboards, and Bill himself on guitars. From the first day, it all just worked. Bill was a bit dark, a bit laconic, and I respected him and felt I understood him—and he certainly understood me, and these songs. There were moments I felt awkward to have the guys hear the rawness of the lyrics, but the feeling passed, and they took the music and the process very seriously. I went back and forth to
Los Angeles three or four times to do the basic tracks and start the mixes with Bill, and the record came together very quickly. When we were about to mix the song “Black Cadillac,” Julian came into the studio looking very uncomfortable. He had an idea, he explained, but before he would tell us what it was, he insisted that I could stop him and tell him to fuck off at any time. He was stumbling all over himself to get it out, but finally explained that he wanted to try to put some warped mariachi-type horns on the end of the song to echo the horns on my dad’s “Ring of Fire,” as a kind of homage to the content of the lyrics. I surprised myself by agreeing immediately. It turned out to be an eerie moment and a subtle reference that not everyone got, but those who did found it hauntingly effective.

  Almost as soon as I was finished with Bill, John was available to start working with me, and we did the second half of the record in New York. We brought my old friend Michael Rhodes up from Nashville to play bass, and there was a sweet feeling of continuity and connection with the past through him, as he’d first played with me on King’s Record Shop in the late eighties, and we had been very close. These sessions also went seamlessly, and I think John felt a bit like a gauntlet had been thrown with the quality of Bill’s work. He rose to the occasion musically, doing his best work.

  One song that John and I wrote, “House on the Lake,” was full of documentary detail about my dad and June’s house in Tennessee—the rose garden, the blue bedroom, the lake itself—and I became concerned that it might be too literal, as I do like poetic license and ambiguity of time and place in songwriting. I was liberated from those concerns after one of the very first times I performed the song in concert, when an acquaintance came up after the show and sighed. “Everyone’s got his own house on the lake . . .”