It's Not You, It's April
On marking a year of grief with a decidedly quiet tune.
You might be reading this in May, or later, and that’s a relief. You see for me, April is that month: crazy, tumultuous April. The robin is on the wing and the roses are way past budding, especially here in DC. But it always seems that there’s something really intense happening in the world in April, doesn’t it? I’ve remarked on the phenomenon before and this spring was no different: amidst the gatherings, the graduations and the beauty of Easter bonnets, we have storms, wars, unrest - deep pain and loss all over the world. Surely, “April is the cruellest month.”
It’s a time of tumult in my family, too. My extended Derry clan has fourteen birthdays in one month, including my own, my little brother’s and our grandmother (who would have been 116 this year!); my sister is a May baby and we even have a high school graduate to celebrate. So much spring joy, it seems almost untoward. And yet April also marked a year since my dad’s death; May is a year since we celebrated his life.
It took us by surprise. If you’re part of my life or you’ve come to one of my shows this year, you’ve heard all this. Dad didn’t want to bother anyone too much - he was quiet about his decline. “Time we had the talk. Come on by. Love, Dad.” A few days later, he was gone; we joke (sort of) that he Irish goodbye-d us.
Grief looks different for everyone, and it is not linear, as a friend also recently bereft of a parent remarked. At first, grief was much like spring weather, brutally pulling me headlong into tears and lamentation or, more often, silence and deep darkness. One week I was in New York, doing my show to good reviews in beautiful April, the next week he was gone. How could this be?
A year on, I do not think that grief must always be associated with sadness. My grief is quieter now, less brutal, but it is my constant companion, and I’m glad of it. It takes me gently by the hand and walks beside me. There are glimpses of my dad in the here and now: my nieces’ sense of humor and love of books, my nephews’ altruism and determinedness, the way my son stands and talks and thinks. Sometimes grief even laughs; it is joyous too.
When my dad’s brother John died this April (yes, true story - as Dad would say, you’ve got to be kidding me) we Derrys gathered as we had almost exactly a year early. Amidst deep concern for our cousins who’d just lost their dad and poignant reminders of those we are missing, my cousin Amy remarked that we’ve got to stop meeting like this. Spot on. Agreed.
The joy we take in meeting as a family, though, is just as undeniable as our sadness. Our bunch of loud and loving Derrys took communal pride in a brilliant man, surrounding John’s sons with all the happy stories and moldy jokes and care that we could. It brought me right back to last year when they all did the same for us, and I couldn’t help but laugh and be loud right along with them.
Ask me more about Dad and about my uncle - I’d certainly love to tell you. But I will let someone else do the talking. The following is from my brother-in-law’s beautiful eulogy for my dad (Champa to the grandkids):
“If he loved you, Champa bore witness to you, and in bearing witness, he lifted you up. His presence was his gift: his witness, his fandom. He knew more than just your greatest hits. He loved the B-sides. He relished in the basement tapes. He wasn’t effusive, but his pride in the people he loved was palpable.“
His absence requires presence of me. And now that April is behind us, here’s some presence, with grief as its pedigree.
“April Fooled Me,” a B-side tune if there ever was one, is a song that has haunted my cabaret fever-dreams for years. It was the title that grabbed me - how clever, I thought - and the composer lyricist team is a favorite of mine - Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. And it is quite beautiful, simple and spare and quiet - just two verses, no intro, no bridge, a complete story about the tricks April plays - present one moment, gone the next. As my sister says, it’s not you. It’s April.
Jerome Kern wrote some really famous music: the luminous “All The Things You Are” has been called the perfect song, and of course his music for Show Boat completely changed how we integrate story and song in the musical theater. But it’s the tunes he wrote with Dorothy Fields that are among the most-performed in his canon. The two began writing together in the 1930’s, penning such hits as “The Way You Look Tonight,” “I Won’t Dance,” “Remind Me,” “A Fine Romance,” and the musical A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. By all accounts they were great friends.
They were slated to start work on Annie Get Your Gun (a project that went to Irving Berlin in the end) when Kern suffered a stroke on a New York street and later died. Fields was heartbroken to lose her friend. Kern’s wife Eva sent Fields a wordless melody Kern had written, “one of his treasures,“ Fields said, “and I simply had to write a lyric to it.”
Once April fooled me
With an afternoon so gold, so warm, so beguiling
That I thought the drowsy earth would wake up smiling
But April fooled me then,
The night was cold.
Once someone fooled me
With a kiss that touched my heart beyond all believing
But like April that sweet moment was deceiving…
It was not really spring nor really love
You were alike, you two
Restless April fooled me
Darling, so did you.
It’s verse two that takes us for a spin; instead of an exact repeat, Fields’ lyric questions everything. Spring and love are awfully unstable above Kern’s rueful, almost nostalgic 7th chord:
I love the sweetness of the rising vocal line at the end. But it’s the lyric here, that perfectly simple twist in eight words, that gets me:
So I marked the year at my dining room table, er, piano, making a basement tape. Again, it’s not perfect, not even close, a fact I must remind myself of constantly to even get brave enough to share. I’m completely unsure what chord I “created” on “nor really love;” tell me if you can figure it out cause that’s not a 7th. I think the mic setup is better (?), although the shadow vowels - those extra sounds after a closing consonant - are off the mark for something so intimate, and you can hear me working the damper pedal like a fiend if you listen close. I threw some reverb on to see if I couldn’t balance it out - no such luck. But like my students, I’m learning.
Must it always be this way, that grief stays with us? I think so. And to be honest, this seems to me to be a good thing. Loss is terrible, yes, but to have had someone in my life who was so great is a gift. I am not interested in “getting over it,” and I don’t believe that’s the way it works. No, thank you. Maybe grief sticks around to mellow into something more like joy. I’m here for it. I’m glad for her company.
Clearly, I’ve got more practicing to do; my dad would expect no less. And April, thank you for coming, but let’s have a little more fun next year. I’m counting on you.
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Have a song you think I should work on? Send it my way - I can’t promise perfection (obviously), but my dinging room table and I would be honored to make some music for you.