Three Reflections on “And You”
“And You” is a remembrance of my father, Paul Morgan, who passed away at the end of July after a 7-year struggle with MSA (Multiple System Atrophy): a rare, degenerative neurological disorder affecting the body's involuntary functions. I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to sing it for him in person on three separate occasions, each time at my parents’ home in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania
I.
The first was Christmas of 2018. Everyone was gathered around the dinner table telling familiar stories in the playful, free-associative way that families do. It was the end of a year of heavy transition. I had moved from Maine to Pennsylvania to New York City. My dad could still come up the stairs, barely, with at least one spotter and everyone else nervously trying not to watch too closely. I don’t think he knew how precarious he looked, clinging to the railing, moving so slowly.
I remember wishing he'd let himself rest and that maybe by saving his strength, he wouldn’t get tired out so quickly. But the desire to preserve our habitual ways of being together - the little traditions that make up the culture of a family, like sitting for hours around the dining room table after Christmas supper - was slower to be taken from my dad than was his ability to participate in them. He had his way of being with his family, and that wasn’t easily replaced or unlearned. I realized that in wishing for him to rest, I was wishing for him to surrender these cherished modes of communion and to relinquish his freedom - which he did by and by, a little more each day, not without heartbreak, but always with astonishing grace.
"I have something to share", I said. Or more likely it was my mother that said, "Kyle has something to share", coaxing me into the spotlight, which, as the youngest of four with seven years between me and my brother, isn't somewhere I’m very comfortable being.
"It's a new song," I said, or something like that. I can't remember if I said that it was about Dad or not. I don't think I wanted to limit my families' experience of it in that way. Because it's a song about all of us and the stable, enduring presence among us that my father was: an understated, gentle energy of ease and calm that balanced the many moments of loud, unrestrained laughter and joy, or the passionate articulations of this or that point in regards to some spiritual or political matter.
It was a brand new song then. I sang imperfectly through a holiday cold, my voice straining. It didn’t matter of course. A stretched moment of uncharacteristic silence followed. A grief long-suspended over the past few years was opened and shared. The table became a still circle of glazed eyes. Even the kids’ voices, seconds ago deep at play became hushed in sudden and silent recognition. The grief over my father’s losses was momentarily permitted, by the grace of art, to be named out loud, allowed, included, and felt together. The loss, the grief, the anticipation of more loss and more grief. The helplessness and the struggle to surrender to the inevitable.
II.
The second time was at a home concert in the fall of 2019, a quick stop on a weekend tour. It was a warm afternoon for late October. We might have ventured to the backyard if it wouldn't have been so difficult for my dad. We were playing that night at The Funhouse: a smoky, sticker-plastered dive bar on the main strip of Bethlehem, PA. Quite a different scene from my parents' downstairs living room, all filled up now with family friends, so much so that one volunteered to listen from just outside the window.
My own dear friends and musical companions were huddled in the corner tight against the piano, my mom and dad's makeshift bedroom - he couldn't go upstairs anymore - made into a makeshift stage.
Somewhere in the middle of the set, I started “And You” by myself, my father just a few steps away in the reclining chair he was forced to sit in all day. It was going fine until the last verse:
I am weak but Thou art strong means a little more each day
As one by one the gifts He gives . . .
And I was unable to continue singing, a sob caught fast in my throat. Here it was again, the grief - buried under the busyness of days, under the weariness of endless train rides teaching music all over NYC, under the residue of years spent trapped in habitual anxiety and compulsive thinking, under the pills to chemically inhibit, the too-late afternoon coffee, and my seeming total incapacity to make sense of my life to begin with - the grief, suddenly rising to the surface, surprising me by it's power, rendering me incapable of completing the second half of the line,
He comes and takes away
I don’t remember if I choked it out or not. Eventually I moved on with relief to the celebratory list of gifts that my father knew in life: his peculiar grace with a soccer ball, the immeasurable love of my mother, his beautiful tenor voice, and yes, myself, his youngest child who he was so proud of. I know because he told me so, often. How proud he was of me and the music I make.
III.
The third and final time, the most bittersweet, was soon after I had come home to Dillsburg at the beginning of July, 2020. On Monday, Mom had texted my siblings and I asking us to call her in the morning. Dad wasn’t leaving his bed anymore and wasn’t eating anything solid. I arrived at home that Thursday evening.
On Sunday, Phil Thorne - our family pastor at West Shore Evangelical Free Church for the entirety of my youth - and his wife Cindy came over to visit. The whole family was gathered around my father’s bed. Phil's presence brought an immediate sense of calm and relief. He held my father's hand, smiling and looking into his eyes, reminding him of the promise of everlasting life and that “yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil.” I didn't find these ideas particularly comforting, but I could see how much it meant to my father, and that was deeply comforting.
It was a moment I wish could have lasted longer because it was evocative of an era long passed, of West Shore, when I had faith of that kind, when we belonged to an unbroken circle of friends who met regularly, knew each other, shared life together, who sang and laughed and celebrated and grieved together. It's the era in which most of "And You" takes place.
After praying, Phil looked around and said, "When I think of the Morgans, I think of music. How about some singing?" And so I got my guitar and we sang "Nearer, My God To Thee":
Nearer, My God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!
E'en though it be a cross
That raiseth me.
A cross indeed, I thought.
Then my mother asked me to sing “And You'”. And I, only a little hesitantly, knowing the pain it can evoke, obliged. Phil continued smiling at my father as once again I sang the lines of loving memory shared between us. My father's face, increasingly masked from expression these past few years, tightened into a familiar look of deep emotion.
The mood lifted when we got to the bridge: an homage to Phil’s many sermons I sat through growing up in church. His favorite pastoral illustration begins, “we are flowers cut off at the stem, eternally separated from the Father”. That, and Isaiah's vision of the Lord - which he recited weekly with deep passion, his voice rising and rising until it filled the sanctuary, booming and quivering with the six-winged seraphim, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!" - were repeated so often throughout the years that they became running (mildly irreverent) jokes amidst my family.
And so now, singing the bridge of "And You" to an audience intimately acquainted with its references, it brought down the house. I felt like a standup comic for about 30 seconds.
But of course this moment of reprieve passed as the song turned again to the reality at hand. Again, tears and silence. With his strong, pastoral voice, Phil led us in a closing prayer. And even though it belonged to a world I could never shape my heart to fit inside, it's familiarity was nevertheless deeply soothing.
After the prayer ended, everyone shifted pretty quickly, as though they needed to leave that area, which had become like holy ground. I remained with my dad for a while. He tried to say something and I thought for a moment I might be able to understand him, but I couldn’t. His eyes kept closing so eventually I said, “I’m going to go get some lunch now, Dad. You rest.”