Friday column on Mary Chapin Carpenter's Ashes and Roses

As part of my extended birthday celebration, I was treated to a ticket to see Mary Chapin Carpenter by our daughters. I have long enjoyed her work and, if truth be told, held a mild crush for her. Her performance at the Sheldon was a wonderful mix of chestnuts and new material. I would like to focus on material from her new album Ashes and Roses. She spoke of it having a narrative arc, of facing loss, of the fantasy of running from it, and the discovery of light over time. Like many creative people, she has spun gold out of the dross of life: a terrible illness, a divorce, the death of her father. As someone interested in grief work, I was taken with her hymn on grief, Learning the World, where Grief gets personified. It “rides quietly on the passenger side,” and “leaves you weeping in the wilderness of the supermarket aisle,” and “sits silently on the edge of your bed…the dear old companion is taking up air/watching you pretend that it’s not really there.” It led me to picture grief less as another image of the Grim Reaper of Death, but perhaps in a more tender vein. For the first time, I pictured Grief with a tear running down her face in the presence of our losses. In our do it yourself, make it up as you go along culture, we do not know the steps to facing life’s large troubles. How does one respond when a loved one is gone, by death or by divorce? In What to Keep and What to Throw Away, she sings “open up the closet/find his winter coat there…fold it up and box it before you’ve time to think,” and walk into the guest room/the last place he was sleeping/see the outline on the pillow/smooth it without weeping.” In a way, it is a follow up to Springsteen’s You’re Missing, where it rattles off all of the things that are in the house, save for his loved one. In time, we make decisions about what to keep or throw away in the sanctuary of memory. In the movie, chasing Amy, the Ben Affleck character is warned about chasing an illusion, a perfect memory, and thereby putting his life on hold for a perfection that cannot be attained in this life. In a similar vein, Ms. Carpenter warns us about ‘chasing what’s already gone.” She sings: “half your life you pay it no attention/the rest you can’t stop wondering/what you should have done/instead of chasing what’s already gone.” I quoted this to a friend who was beating himself up about past mistakes as a way of highlighting that the past can become an obstacle to our best futures if we let it become our pole star. It could be youth, a lost love, a vision of oneself at 19. Maturity ties up the shards of even a missed past and gathers them into a new future. It learns when to discard, when to tear, when to sew back up, and when to keep as the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 3 echoes in our hearts and minds. as Joan Baez said” we all know what memories can bring/they bring diamonds and rust.” One of the things I so admire about artists is their generosity of spirit. When they produce something, they say, “I've been through this; take a walk with me, and let me show you what I have seen.” they can be companions on our way through life. Knowing that they can make it though may give us hope that form our own ashes can rise, if not a phoenix, then roses too.