Learning How to Blow my Blues: the Grief and Gift of Saxophone Healing

A father’s love lives on

When I first read the phrase “anticipatory grief” in a book, my gut leapt in recognition. I was eight months into what would be almost a year of caregiving my spouse through a rapid form of ALS.

Already I’d experienced the odd sternum-tightening of tears that needed to be let go, and then the jaw pain that I have since come to associate with grief and stress. When my time of caregiving came to an end, I needed a molar removed; I had clenched the tooth into oblivion, cleaved in half, and not salvageable.

Healing is a form of work

It was mid-April when my spouse died. My sons — ages 16, 19, and 23 — set about the work of grieving and re-emerging into life together with me. We had all worked hard to care for and to love the man who had been husband and father.

Healing is work, too, and the trajectory of caregiving has a tendency to carry you through grief and loss, I discovered, if you allow it. We were so used to a working pace, we stayed with it.

Follow the pieces

My mind sought answers in the same way it had spent months questioning.

And one day, into my mind — into my gut, really — came my father’s saxophone. I’d played the piano since childhood, and as a grade-schooler had tried for even a honk from that old sax, but had had to give up, and take on the flute for the school band.

At some point in my teens, I’d once again asked my dad to show me how to get a sound out of that reed instrument, but again, no! Not so much as a squawk!

So how was it that the instrument should come to my mind now?

If there is one thing I’ve learned about the grieving process it is to pay attention to what enters your mind and heart. Follow these pieces, however small. I’ve seen friends take up working with clay, creating a garden, playing women’s hockey, and crashing around on a set of drums to heal — all pieces that worked.

At the time, my father appeared to be suffering from some minor stroke. After years of playing the saxophone, having taught himself as a kid — the sax was given to him by a high school teacher — he was no longer playing. I asked him if I could borrow it.

Taking on another’s joy

He had worked as a self-employed carpenter. With a family of four children to support, his work days were long. I have memories of him coming home, showering, eating dinner, and then playing that instrument.

It was his joy.

He played it in church, as his offering to worship. Now, he said I could have it. He couldn’t play it anymore, his fingers were affected and so was his breathing.

Would I be able to honk or squawk?

I took it home. I watched videos on how to put it together. I bought a fingering chart and a basic instruction book.

Then that moment of blowing into the mouthpiece… And a sound emerged! Not a squawk, but a sound.

I realized the fingering was like the flute really. I tightened my lips, and breathed into it again; how was it I could finally get a sound from this thing now, years after trying with no success and feeling blocked out of an instrument I’d always wanted to play?

Then too, I thought, how was it my father had lost this? We’d all lost so much.

Day after day

That first day, I fiddled about with the fingering of a couple of notes, and after ten minutes my lips were buzzing. Ten minutes the next day, and the inside of my bottom lip was sore.

But day after day, I had that ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty. I could get a sound, but holding down the keys was tricky. I finally took it to a repair person, who re-did all the leather pads. He said he was amazed that my father could have played at all in the last couple of years, and I felt sad for my father, who — always — had felt a deep need to cut corners and costs and save money.

And who had had to work his fingers hard to extract notes from the instrument as a result; I wondered if he might have played longer had he spent the money and had it repaired.

But I’d also realized that that type of wondering is to wander down paths that we have no need to go. It would now be my place to play, to enjoy. To accept.

Habit becomes ritual

After several weeks, habit had grown to become ritual. And so I had my daily ritual that would last between twenty to forty minutes. It got to the point where if I went to bed and had not played, I would get up again, and play, then sleep.

And that is the best of ritual: it heals.

Six months later, our family doctor called me. He was also my father’s doctor in the small town we lived. He wanted to share with me that he’d diagnosed my father with ALS, too. The odds of both husband and father are so low, yet there we were.

Gift

That was when I knew that the ease with which I’d been able to get a sound out of that old saxophone was a gift; as my father lost his ability to breathe, to play, it was given to me. A responsibility of the best kind.

For that first year of loss, I played every day.

Life has a way of shaping to allow for the time we need, and then it can slowly shift as we move back into some different time.

But that daily touchstone kept me on the path I needed to be. And when my father went into care, I would carry in the saxophone in the new case I found for it, with a book of Christmas tunes and an old hymn book, and play for Dad, all his favorites.

As he lost all ability to speak, I liked to think that he could close his eyes and play right through me and, together with the music, we were both speaking as best we could. We shared in those times.

Even now, after he is gone these past few years, when I play, my time of healing is with me, my feeling of having passed through and arrived on another side. And perhaps most, I feel my father beside me, with me through the tough times and with all his love.

I am so grateful for the gift that is music.

Alison Acheson is the author of Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS, a memoir of caregiving, recently re-released as an audio book, narrated by Ellen Dubin.