The news came to me today via my Instagram feed: Glen Hansard, dead at 56, killed hours earlier via a motorcycle accident. And when I saw it, my stomach dropped, I felt a wave of cold— for this man, this artist, this deeply soulful musician whom I’ve never even met.
Is it ridiculous to grieve a person you’ve never met and only known from afar?
And yet for those of us who loved his art, it did feel like he allowed us to meet him in a sense. That he reached out and gifted us an offering. From the first listen I felt moved by the emotion-filled, strained sound of his voice, by his songs coming to me through my headphones, or via my stereo speakers, or from the short distance of a darkened concert stage. I knew that what he was offering wasn’t just music, that he was offering us a piece of himself.
“I choose to believe that there is good in people,” he’s quoted as saying. “And that everything is a lesson. Our place on Earth is to go deeper, to somehow get wiser. To have spirit.”
He’s dead? I thought as I stared at a circa-2010 photo of his cheerful, red bearded face, and then as I called up a clip of him singing in the movie Once. I thought about how much I’d loved that movie, and how much I loved his music in general, and how I hadn’t listened to his songs in a while which now made me feel guilty, like somehow if I’d only listened more, or been a more consistent and ardent and devoted fan he…what, wouldn’t be dead?
And then I thought about how my husband met Glen Hansard once. He was taking a film class at New York Film Academy, where my husband teaches, and was crossing the street from Union Square back to campus just as my husband was crossing the other way. Glen had just been recently nominated for Once, which we’d both seen and adored, and so as they crossed paths my husband raised a fist and called out, “Way to go, Glen!” And Glen Hansard, hearing this, turned back in delight, raising his fist and gleefully calling out, “Thanks, man!”
Tonight, we listened to his music during dinner, one song after another, each one reaching to us from somewhere beyond the veil, each one reaching in and breaking me a bit more open—because music is always the thing that moves me, that allows me to feel, that thaws away the icy business of productivity and type A disassociation—and soon I was weeping. Tears rolling down my cheeks as I sat there looking at the photographs on my bookshelf: of my mom in her youth, and my grandfather standing before his clock collection, and my dearest friend Gabe, holding a 16mm film camera during our bright green first year of film school. All of them now gone. All of them somewhere far off beyond that veil where I cannot reach.
And I thought about Glen Hansard unexpectedly joining them there. How he woke up this morning and started his day, with all his plans and worries and fears and hopes, not knowing that today would be his last. How at some point he boarded his motorcycle and drove out into the dark streets of Dublin, or wherever he was, never realizing that he wouldn’t make it to his destination. And when that final moment came, when his soul left his body, what did he think? Did his thoughts flit to his family? And were they still sleeping, or starting their days, or in the middle of some menial tasks? Did they have a shadow of recognition that that their worlds were about to change? And what of his small child, who would now grow up without a father? Did Glen Hansard’s soul cry out in mourning for that child’s future, for all the stolen time that he surely thought was rightfully his?
I realize, my friends, even as I type this, even as I listen to Glen Hansard’s voice sing to me again and again “there’s no point trying to change it,” that none of this is just about Glen Hansard.
This is about life and death and my own dark grief.
The thing is, I don’t know how to make sense of this kind of loss. This sudden departure. That a person can be here one minute and gone the next. That they can exist, and then be gone. It is the most basic fact in the world, that all of us will die. And yet it is completely incomprehensible.
Where was I? my daughter often asks me about the world before she was born. Such a mind blowing inquiry. And I want to ask now, where are they?
I am listening to your voice, Glen Hansard, and yet you are no longer here.
And I keep thinking about how many people must be listening to your voice tonight, digging up the artifacts you left us, visiting your proofs of life, collecting your soulful offerings in the palms of our hands.
I hope you can feel how much it means to us, to have these artifacts, to have been offered your gifts. And I hope that the ripple effects of your offerings are reaching you and reverberating through your spirit, wherever you are now.
And the same for you, Mom. Always and forever the same for you.