There is a particular quality to the silence that follows a death. It is not the comfortable silence of an empty house, or the anticipatory silence before music starts. It is something heavier — a silence with texture and weight, one that presses against the inside of your chest and doesn't move when you ask it to.
2022 was the year I learned what that silence felt like. I lost both of my paternal grandparents — within the same year, one after the other. They were my people. Not in a casual sense. In the truest sense. They were the ones who had always had my back, who loved me without condition, who made me feel — as their only grandchild — that I was someone's entire light. When they were gone, something structural in me gave way. A floor I hadn't known I was standing on.
And then, the morning after my grandmother's funeral, my son was born.
I have never known how to hold those two things in the same sentence without going quiet. Life arriving in the same breath as loss. My grandfather had been lucky enough to meet him before he passed — and I carry that image with me every day. But grief doesn't wait for convenient timing, and neither does new life. I was thirty years old, standing at the threshold of both at once, and I had no language for any of it.
What I had instead was music.
Why language fails us first
Grief researchers speak of something called "cognitive load" — the way acute loss consumes the mental resources we normally use for complex tasks like writing, reasoning, and making sense of things. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for language and executive function, becomes quieter. The limbic system, the emotional and memory center of the brain, becomes louder.
Music, unlike language, doesn't require the prefrontal cortex to receive it. It arrives through a different door — one that stays open even when everything else is shut. This is why, in the worst weeks, I couldn't hold a conversation but I could sit with a record playing from beginning to end and feel, at least for those forty minutes, that I was not entirely alone inside myself.
"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything."
— Attributed to Plato
My father had always known this, I think — instinctively, without needing it explained. He played records the way other people lit candles. Growing up, weekends with him meant the house was always filled with classical music. Deliberate, purposeful, present. He worked in radio for years and I grew up setting my alarm to his station just to hear his voice in the morning. Long before I had words for what music was doing to me, he had shown me that it did something. That it mattered. That it was not background noise — it was how you made a room feel like somewhere safe.
In 2022, I reached back for everything he had ever handed me without realizing it.
The songs that find us
I've thought a lot about why we reach for specific music in specific moments of loss, and I think it has something to do with resonance in the most literal sense — the physical phenomenon where one vibrating object causes another to vibrate at the same frequency. When you are vibrating at the frequency of grief, certain music vibrates with you. It doesn't resolve the feeling. It matches it. And there is an enormous, quiet relief in being matched.
In the early weeks after losing my grandparents, one of the most painful things was the feeling of being unreachable. The ordinary world was continuing at a frequency I could no longer hear. People spoke to me and I nodded. I was present in body and somewhere else entirely in mind. Music was the only thing that met me where I actually was — not to pull me out, not to hurry me along, but simply to sit beside me in the dark and say: I know. I know exactly what this feels like.
Classical music, the language my father had spoken to me my whole life, took on a new weight in those months. There is something in the architecture of a symphony — the way it moves through tension and release, through darkness and something approaching light — that mirrors the actual shape of grief better than almost any other form I know. It doesn't rush toward resolution. It earns it, slowly, or sometimes doesn't reach it at all, and lets that be enough.
This is what I mean when I say music carries things that language cannot. A piece of music doesn't describe an emotion — it enacts it. You don't read grief in a symphony. You feel it move through you in real time. The music becomes a container for something that otherwise has nowhere to go, and in holding it, it holds you too.
Music That Carried Me Through
What comes after
I am still in it, honestly. Grief doesn't resolve on a schedule, and depression — which followed close behind the loss — has its own pace entirely. But I am writing this, which means something in me has found enough ground to stand on. Music gave me that ground, in increments, on the days when I needed to feel something other than nothing. When I needed proof that I was still capable of being moved — which meant I was still capable of getting through.
My son is growing up now, in Vermont, in a house where music plays the way it always played in my father's house. Deliberately. As a presence. Not background noise, but the thing that changes the temperature of a room. I don't know yet what he'll make of it. But I know what my father gave me without realizing the full weight of the gift, and I intend to give my son the same.
If you are in the middle of a grief that has taken your words — press play. Not to fix anything. Not to feel better before you're ready. Just to have company in the place you're actually in. There is music that has survived centuries because it is equal to human suffering. It was made for exactly this. It will meet you there.