Last week, a very dear friend of mine from college passed away. How do you even say that? She died? She lost her battle with cancer? She is no longer with us? Aren’t we still too young for this?
My friend was a pianist, as am I. We met in college – I was just figuring out how to be a music major and she made everything look so easy. I wanted to be an accompanist, excuse me, collaborative pianist, which is also what she was, so we connected over playing for singers and sightreading and reading opera scores.
In those college days, music was everything: we were in constant pursuit of perfection and emotional connection and we spent hours upon hours in practice rooms trying to find the slightest glimpse of either. I was never able to find the balance between the two and found perfection too difficult to attain. I leaned into emotional connection, which, in retrospect, has been a fairly bumpy path, but has certainly taught me a great deal about people and about myself.
Some people bring light and life to everyone they meet. My friend was like that. She was incredibly talented, super funny, bright, caring, and she would go out of her way to help anyone. I’m in awe of how much she accomplished and how many lives she touched and I feel lousy that I didn’t work harder to stay connected. You live in the crucible of college life and then move on to families and jobs and those college days remain crystalized in your memory as you scroll past updates about other people’s lives on Facebook or Insta. I feel like we should do better at staying connected since we live in a world built for seemingly limitless connection.
But, the amazing thing about music is that it transcends time and space. I can still hear the singing of intricate melodies from a concert many years ago as if it were yesterday – the timbre of each voice, the play of the lyrics, and the brilliance of their voices as they sang of the waves. And my friend, sitting at the piano, breathing with the singers, playing each phrase so that everything was just perfect.
Bravo, my dear friend. Bravo.
