September When it Comes
December 2023
The singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash describes the song ‘September When it Comes’ – A duet she recorded with her father in the final months of his life in 2002 – as a ‘Postcard From The Future’ . A beautiful prescient missive about the death of her dad Johnny Cash who died in September 2003.
It was a song which captivated me the first time I heard it, sitting in the drive at my home in Preston listening to the radio in the car. The tones of the father’s fading but unmistakeable voice overlaid across that of his daughter. For all the world as if all of their cultural, genetic and emotional bond had been caught in the same cadence. Two voices landed on one last note ; before she took it upon herself and went on without him. Before he disappeared forever.
The song was bad timing for me. Or so it seemed at the time.
In the winter of 2003 I was in my first year of ordained ministry in the Church of England and just about to start taking funerals. In the kind of parish I was serving in this largely meant supporting people to say goodbye to their parents. But Rosanne’s postcard had arrived first. Letting me know that what I was doing was not abstract ; that it was also about me, and my own mum and dad. It enabled me to be very present to what I was doing. To notice . Remembering that although the death of our parents is always seen as the least warranted of griefs and the most easily dismissed it is also our biggest certainty. That one day they will be gone. That we will , under normal circumstances, outlive those who created our world. Who created us. Assuming that we knew or were raised by both our parents, we all exist in one of three states. Either both parents are living, or one parent is living, or they are both dead. Life shapes itself differently and reshapes as death occurs and each phase is as distinctive as the next as our world and sense of self shifts on its axis.
For a while because of ‘September When it Comes’ I became haunted by the death of my father. Haunted by an event that wouldn’t happen for another fifteen years. The echoes of his final days in 2018 scribbled themselves down and rolled backwards towards me in 2003. I was burying strangers, the parents of others, but if I lost concentration even for a minute it was him that I was putting in that hole. Even though in 2003 he was plump and 68 and still whistling through his teeth when he did little jobs around the house. Still collecting banknotes and laughing at his own jokes . He wasn’t 2018 dad. Skeletal and agitated. Spooning ‘so called ice cream’ complainingly from a hospital dish.
Death is a cliché that none of us survive. That moment when we realise that people who love us or who share our memories, or whose music occupies our day, will one day disappear never to be seen again, and all we will have left is memory and some old coats. As someone memorably said, “Who thought that up ?” Because it happens every day we don’t think much about the fact that everyone eventually simply disappears and never comes back. Leaving all their stuff behind for everyone else to sort out. It’s so mundane that we forget that right in the centre of our lives is a magician’s trick that makes people disappear. I am a priest so apparently I should get how this works. I don’t . Not really. I am, like everyone else, a little girl who has let go of someone’s hand in a crowd at a fair. Now both my parents are dead . Now I will have to find my way home on my own.
