Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

I’m writing the stories on my blog in no specific order, so there will be situations with people that are no longer in my life, whether it be by choice (as in I no longer choose to have them around me), or by force (when one of us reached the end of our journey in this life) .

One of the main people that will have cameos in my stories will be my father. For those that know me in real life, you know my father passed away. For those that knew me prior to his death, you know he was one of the most important people in my life. I did not handle his death well.

I went through all the stages of grief, sometimes I still go through them. I think the death of a loved one is something we never truly get over, we just learn to deal with having a hole in our lives. Because of this, there are random times that the loss will hit us like a ton of bricks, and we feel the loss like it’s fresh and new.

With my dad, the main trigger of emotion was music. He loved all sorts of music, whether it be Beethoven or Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stones, Dixie Chicks. All of it. He had hundreds of CDs and vinyl records, and always had some kind of sound system set up that he could play anything whenever he wanted.

But I digress.

Sort of.

But my story is short, so it’s all good.

Several months after the death of my father, I was sitting alone in my living room and crying about life and death and everything that was happening. I was 25 at that point (he’d passed away just before my 25^th birthday) and I was getting ready to go to bed. As I was shutting down my laptop, I’d asked out loud for some kind of sign he was at least ok, wherever he was.

Of course there was no answer.

I closed the laptop and went to go shut off the living room lights. As I was walking out the living room door to the kitchen, my laptop started playing music.

I know, I know. I probably left it on, was watching something, and it hadn’t shut down properly. But I hadn’t been watching anything on it (I’d been watching TV), and didn’t have any music on my computer at the time. And even if I did, it wouldn’t have been this.

The song that echoed out of my computer speakers was none other than “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel. The original one, from the 1960’s. If you’re not sure what song that is, you can hear it here.

Of course I did the rational thing and went back to my PC to see if it was on and if it had anything loaded. It was on and had media player loaded, but nothing was in the media player. I closed media player out, and the song continued playing until it was over, at which point my PC continued to shut down.

I did a search the next day and there was no Sound of Silence downloaded anywhere on it.

I don’t have an explanation as to WHY this happened, I can only say I am glad it did. Although that was a really eerie song to play, it was one of my dad’s favourites (I’m Canadian, it’s spelled properly) and it gave me some kind of sense of closure that wherever he was, he WAS OK. And I needed that at that time.