{"id":2175,"date":"2019-07-24T17:39:23","date_gmt":"2019-07-24T17:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/?p=2175"},"modified":"2019-07-29T22:48:18","modified_gmt":"2019-07-29T22:48:18","slug":"love-loss-and-a-country-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/love-loss-and-a-country-song\/","title":{"rendered":"Love, Loss, and a Country Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

The calendar is a mystifying tyrant, often conveying the passage of time with mathematics that defy the heart\u2019s reality.\u00a0 This week She commands me to note that this Friday marks six years since my younger sister Jane<\/a> died after a long battle with breast cancer.\u00a0 Six years?\u00a0 Calendar, are you sure?\u00a0 I can still hear Jane’s voice as if she dropped by yesterday afternoon. \u00a0Just the other day, I had the strangest instinct to call her on the phone.<\/p>\n

Sitting on the porch during a welcome break in the summer heat, awash in the soothing fervor of the cicadas, I think for the umpteenth time about where to find grace in the aftermath of devastating loss.\u00a0 Those thoughts ramble, unauthorized but determined, to a story I heard a few weeks ago. \u00a0If you hang out in Nashville longer than about 15 minutes, you are bound to encounter such tales. After 25 years here, I\u2019ve heard this one more than once, but I love it still.\u00a0 It explains the origin of a classic country song.<\/p>\n

High on a hill south of town at a benefit concert I attended with friends, outside under a June evening\u2019s sapphire sky, songwriter Kent Blazy recalled his first meeting with a young and eager singer from Oklahoma who was getting nowhere pitching a song.\u00a0 The young man came to him for help, saying, \u201cI\u2019ve got this idea for a song that\u2019s been rejected eight or nine times already.\u201d\u00a0 Blazy indicated with a roll of the eyes he was not encouraged by this news, but he asked what the song was about.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s about telling people you love them before they die,\u201d came the reply.<\/p>\n

Well, no wonder, Blazy thought. That\u2019s such a downer; who wants to hear a song about that?\u00a0Yet something moved him to sit down with this beginner, and they worked out a new iteration that was recorded by the young Oklahoman and released 30 years ago this summer. If Tomorrow Never Comes<\/a> <\/em>became the first No. 1 single for the legendary Garth Brooks.<\/a><\/p>\n

Loving the underdog element of this story and a longtime fan of the beautiful tune, I listened closely again as Blazy performed it.\u00a0 And I noticed something I hadn\u2019t before. While the lyrics were ultimately crafted to imply a romantic viewpoint, perhaps to get past the label\u2019s bean counters, the core of the original idea remains, clear as a bell in the second stanza.\u00a0 The refrain we longtime fans can sing from memory goes like this:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf tomorrow never comes<\/p>\n

Will she know how much I loved her<\/p>\n

Did I try in every way, to show her every day<\/p>\n

That she\u2019s my only one<\/p>\n

And if my time on earth were through<\/p>\n

And she must face this world without me<\/p>\n

Is the love I gave her in the past<\/p>\n

Gonna be enough to last,<\/p>\n

If tomorrow never comes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the second stanza moves on to the very personal heartbreak that provided that original, long-ago inspiration for Brooks:<\/p>\n

\u201cCause I\u2019ve lost loved ones in my life<\/p>\n

Who never knew how much I loved them<\/p>\n

Now I live with the regret<\/p>\n

That my true feelings for them never were revealed<\/p>\n

So, I made a promise to myself<\/p>\n

To say each day how much she means to me<\/p>\n

And avoid that circumstance<\/p>\n

Where there\u2019s no second chance to tell her how I feel.<\/p>\n

And if tomorrow never comes\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this verse I hear a tiny glimmer that illuminates gratitude about the circumstances of my sister\u2019s passing.\u00a0 I had lots of chances to tell her I loved her, many opportunities to show her, especially in her final weeks and months, and some divine guiding hand led me to take many of those.\u00a0 It is not something for which one can claim credit, but simply be grateful, that the universe conspired to make those things possible.\u00a0 And knowing this was so does not diminish the deepest sense of loss.\u00a0It simply migrates it to a form that includes, in the wide spectrum of emotion that is grief, a small grain of peace.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That peace joins with special prayers for those who lose loved ones without warning, robbing them of those vital final chances to say what needs to be said.\u00a0 And that heartbreak, of course, is what makes the promise Brooks made to himself so deeply important\u2014because none of us can know when tomorrow never comes.<\/p>\n

If credit is due to anyone for the inspiration to tell Jane so often in her final months that I loved her, it probably belongs to my father.\u00a0 His habit of freely expressing his love to his wife and children, not necessarily a routine thing for men of his generation, is likely his greatest legacy.\u00a0It was a pattern he continued until the final hours of his life, which ended just five months after his youngest daughter left us.\u00a0 As complicated and challenging a man as he was, I am reminded that of all the standards he and Jane set for living a good life, none may be more important than that one.\u00a0It\u2019s my job now to pass it along.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026So, tell that someone that you love<\/em><\/p>\n

Just what you\u2019re thinking of<\/em><\/p>\n

If tomorrow never comes.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The calendar is a mystifying tyrant, often conveying the passage of time with mathematics that defy the heart\u2019s reality.\u00a0 This week She commands me to note that this Friday marks six years since my younger sister Jane died after a long battle with breast cancer.\u00a0 Six years?\u00a0 Calendar, are you sure?\u00a0 I can still hear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16],"tags":[115,119,116,113,117,114,118],"class_list":["post-2175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mid-life-adventures","category-siblings-2","tag-garth-brooks","tag-grief-recovery","tag-if-tomorrow-never-comes","tag-love","tag-nashville","tag-sisters-death","tag-songwriters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmachronicles.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}