Sadness Is the Soul’s Way of Saying, “This Mattered”

How the spirit of Jane ‘Nightbirde’ Marczewski found its way to me at a time of personal grief

Before her beautiful soul left the planet on February 19, Jane ‘Nightbirde’ Marczewski struggled with poor health but through music became a beacon of courage to millions. Her last Instagram message was about the importance of feeling our feelings, both the happy and the sad. Mourning your losses doesn’t mean you’re not grateful. Sadness, she said, is the soul’s way of saying, ‘This mattered.”

Her long battle with cancer is over now. Although saddened, those of us who became aware of her lovely spirit understand that she mattered. Like most of her followers, I never met her in person. But somehow, through the power of her voice, her soul touched my life and helped me through a difficult time.

Seven days before I ever heard of Nightbirde,

I knelt at the bedside of a friend who could no longer speak. His name was Edward, but I always thought of him as Eddie, which is what he’d gone by during all the years we were in elementary and high school together.

As Eddie, he’d been a crack basketball player, a fast-breaking forward who never failed to surprise his opponents. As Edward, he was a prominent banker, a man with deep pockets, board member of a foundation that distributed $7 million dollars to underserved populations.

It was Edward who suffered a stroke several weeks ago while caring for his elderly mother in his home. Eddie would have been too fast. He’d have seen the threat and somehow dodged it. No one knows how long Edward had been lying on the floor unconscious before the backup caregiver arrived the following morning.

When it comes to strokes, the sooner you get medical attention the better your chances of recovery. Edward’s chances were not good. He lost speech, movement, and the ability to eat food on his own. After several weeks in the hospital, rehab, and a brief stay in some other facility, Edward was allowed to go home where his health took a turn for the worse. His friends were told he would transition soon. If any of us wanted to say farewell, this was probably the time to do it.

I wanted to say a proper goodbye

But I didn’t want to see my old friend stuck in a hospital bed, supported by tubes and an oxygen tank. I wanted to see Eddie. Reminisce about the old days. The after-school hoops on the basketball court my Dad set up in our backyard. Talk about that time I snuck out of the house so I could hitch a ride with Eddie to a party I was forbidden to go to. Then later, our lunches as grown men — rich man, poor man; the banker and the writer — but in the end, just Eddie and me.

When I put myself in Edward’s place, weighing the funeral I would certainly attend against the chance to be with him one last time, I set aside my initial hesitation and joined two other childhood friends for a visit to his bedside. We shored each other up, which made it possible to be more fully present with our stroke-afflicted friend.

When I’m dead, I doubt that I will care much about who and how many attend my funeral. I want to love and be loved while I’m still here. Whether there are tubes running though me or not. Why would Edward — Eddie, my old friend — feel any different?

So I went to his bedside

And I held his hand while another friend stroked his brow and another reminisced about the old days, suggesting finally that we pray the Our Father. Edward did not have words for any of us. But he spoke to us with his eyes. There was also that moment when I let go of his hand. And he reached up to take it back.

When we left his home that afternoon, it seemed that Edward would probably be with us another two weeks. But 12 hours later, he was gone.

I don’t know why, but Edward’s passing hit me harder than I expected. I was not quite myself for the next few days. I scribbled a few paragraphs for an article I’d been writing about Critical Race Theory. But I couldn’t write a word of fiction, the one thing I do that keeps me grounded, rooted in my deepest self.

Here’s where Nighbirde comes in

On the night before Edward’s funeral, I received an email from another old friend on the West Coast. It was late, but I wanted to read and answer her email before turning off the computer.

Her message was similar to other emails, which include links to movies or books she thinks I might appreciate. But this particular message linked to a clip from America’s Got Talent, a program I watch in snatches and only by accident if it happens to be on when I turn on the TiVo.

I must have been the only person on the planet who by August of 2021 had not seen the viral performance by an impossibly thin young woman with elfish hair who identified herself only as Jane, adding that she uses the name Nightbirde when she sings.

She gave no last name. There was no one backstage rooting for her, like with so many other hopefuls supported by family and friends. Just a skinny young woman with torn jeans looking like a waif from Les Miserables or a workhouse exile from the universe of Charles Dickens. Please sir, I want some more.

But as everybody knows, appearances deceive. Before singing an original song called “It’s Okay,” the 30-year-old Nightbirde responded to a question by one of the judges who wanted to know how much singing she’d done in the past few years.

Turns out, she’d done very little

Because for the past few years, she’d been battling cancer. The judges, trying to put a positive spin on things, wanted to know if she was alright now. After all, here she was auditioning for America’s Got Talent. Surely she must be getting better. And yes, she was better enough to appear on the show. But she still had cancer in her lungs, in her spine, and in her liver. Which left her with a 2 percent chance of survival.

It seemed to me that you could have heard a pin drop in that moment. But there was still plenty of ambient noise in the AGT audience. The silence that fell occurred within me.

Within that silence, I listened to Jane the Nightbirde sing “It’s Okay.” A song that came from her own dark night of the soul. A night when she fought back doubt, fear, pain, and a profound sense of abandonment, to reach not a breaking point but a breakthrough.

Eventually the audience did fall into pin-drop silence, which continued while the Nightbirde’s voice ascended to an apex of bell-like clarity. She seemed as vulnerable as crystal but as robust as steel.

A volcanic eruption filled the theater when the Nightbirde reach the last note of of her song. Standing ovations all around. Each of the judges stood. Even the notoriously dour Simon Cowell. You cannot fake that kind of authenticity.

Something happens during the dark night of the soul

A night when Jane struggled with what was left of her body. To deal with the loss of her breasts, the reported loss of her baby when she was 15 weeks pregnant, and the loss of her husband who, though reportedly with her through during the first stages of her treatment, eventually ended the marriage she desperately wanted to hold onto.

A dark night of the soul indeed. But when you wind up on the other side of Why me, sometimes you understand a truth: Suffering is the process through which we are freed of our illusions.

Because Nightbirde had been set free from hers — even the closely held ones about love — that birdlike waif of a woman touched the soul of everyone in the audience. With her song, yes. With her courage. And with a profound absence of victimhood. She touched everyone with those things. But she touched many others, including me, with one thing more.

That extraordinary something extra came when she gave the following answer to Simon Cowell who commented on the courage it took to perform after all she’s been through.

“You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.”

Well, you could have bowled me over with an acorn when I heard that. I wasn’t able to respond to my West Coast friend after seeing the clip. Not right away. Not without watching it again and again, fighting back tears with each viewing. It was nearly three AM before I finally sent the email and went to bed. That’s because I had to Google this Nightbirde. Look her up on Instagram. Find out what happened after America’s Got Talent gave her the Golden Buzzer, sending her straight to the show’s live performances.

If you’re a fan of AGT, you probably know she couldn’t continue with the show because the progress of her cancer made it impossible to do so. And you may also know that her performance had been streamed more than 200 million times, according to an update posted by AGT.

Her Instagram following grew to 1.1 million

Photos of her fragile body and shorn head are met with thousands of prayers and fervent wishes for her full recovery. At least one podcast has appeared in recent days recounting the story of her life, her journey as a singer, her doubts and the GoFundMe that was set up to help with her medical expenses.

She sang one song.

And it reached millions. After I went to bed that night, Jane the Nightbirde was in and out of my dreams. The next morning, I drove to Atlanta for Edward’s funeral.

During that same week, which occurred during the Height of the Lion’s Gate, I met another close friend for lunch at one of our favorite restaurants. We talked about how the pandemic had made it impossible for us to meet in restaurants and to go on with our lives as usual.

And how the strain of restriction had done one thing we had not anticipated. COVID made us realize how important NOW is. We know intellectually, of course, that time is a continuum and mostly an illusion. We know with our minds that NOW is all there is. But it takes something like a pandemic and the friends we’d lost over the past 20 months to remind us that NOW is always the right time to be present with each other. Because there is no guarantee of tomorrow. Ever.

As I thought of Nightbirde and Edward, I remembered something I heard Werner Erhard say back when EST was a big thing in the human potential movement:

“Your circumstances do not determine your reality.”

After lunch that day, the skies over my small town just north of Atlanta grew menacingly dark. A thunderstorm had been predicted. But I still had a few errands to run. I pulled out of the car park and headed away from home toward the nearest Costco.

On a strip of North Main Street, I came to a stop at an intersection and looked up past the traffic light. To my right, I saw a white church steeple that stuck out in defiant contrast to the increasingly inky sky. There was something otherworldly about the moment. It was three o’clock in the afternoon but that sky seemed to be racing toward night.

I pulled over and reached for my camera. Then stood on the nearest corner to capture what I could of the slim white spire that pulled my eyes toward heaven. I’m not much of a photographer. I use the camera to help me see more clearly, to make me more aware of each moment, to stop time a little. But sometimes it doesn’t matter whether you’re good at something or not. As long as you give yourself over to it.

So I took a picture of that white church steeple. To mark the day, the moment, and the NOW. To capture an objective correlative for all that I had experienced during this week of death and dying and letting go. And to provide a visual metaphor, a perch for that birdlike woman with the beautiful bell-like voice. The Nightbirde whose 15 minutes of fame helped me say goodbye to an old friend.

It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.

©2022 Andrew Jazprose Hill

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