It's a Sad Song, But I'll Sing it Anyway

I went to stay with an aunt and uncle in Maryland who were really second (third?) cousins, but much too old to be peers, with children of their own. I was twelve. Thin in the hollows of my cheeks. They lived in a renovated little red schoolhouse with their three babies on the kind of pastoral plot of land straight out of Little House on the Prairie. I came from a suburban neighborhood in northern New Jersey lined with Sears and Roebuck houses with street lights, cement curbs, and Dads who came home for dinner at 5 pm in grey suits. Less than an acre in actuality, the tall grasses seemed to stretch for miles. That summer, they concealed a mainstay of farm life: an orange barn cat, with a fresh litter of kittens. I found them mewling and climbing all over a rusted, old wagon wheel. All except one. There was a grey calico, the clear runt of the litter, laying prostrate by the edge of the wheel. Her pink tongue was askew, panting heavily; her eyes crusted over with infection.

My school year was over and I had survived a milieu of broken promises, unwanted advances, violated boundaries, and a surmounting avalanche of silencing. I hardly spoke but no one seemed to notice anymore. I kept trying to retreat back into my own body and not even I wanted me, recoiling in the dark at my own inability to breathe a steady rhythm. To do the one simple life that brings life.

I am not an animal lover. I do not swoon over cute, furry faces. I do not ask strangers on the street to pet their pups. I do not hate them, I do not love them. It is an investment I cannot afford to give; my body already wracked with too much empathy for other living things. I have always been this way. There is no explanation for why I ran to a kitten destined for death, determined to save it.

But I did.

I wrapped it in the skirt of my dress and ran it back to the schoolhouse. I presented her to the adults in the kitchen, bearing the weight of her failure to thrive. I was twelve and I became a mother, nursing shame and harboring responsibility. Please help her, I said. No tears. No pleading. I had long stopped believing that people would be moved by my pain. I just wanted to know what I could do for her myself.

I was given a washcloth soaked in warm water and white vinegar to clean her eyes, swollen shut. A dropper and a mug of warm goat’s milk from one of the goat Mama goats in the back. I didn’t force it into her mouth. There had been too much demanded of me against my will at too young. If she didn’t want to live, I would not be the one to demand it of her. But she licked the drops off the end until it was gone.

I used an old, checkered kitchen towel to make a bed in the yard, next to her siblings who didn’t notice her absence but did want to share a comfy bed. Good, I thought. They don’t have to like her. Hostile bodies are still warm bodies. They just have to keep her warm for the night, hidden from those who would make a meal of her.

When I woke the next morning, I didn’t pause to put shoes on. The dew kept the hem of my dress plastered to my ankles as I ran. I rehearsed finding her dead over and over as my feet thundered through the threads of grass. It was the obvious ending. It was the expected one.

But it wasn’t what happened.

I found her sniffing around the tall grasses, several feet from her kitchen towel. Her eyes still red, but open. I will go to my grave swearing she saw me.

I nursed her for the whole three days we were there. Cleaning her eyes until they were clear. Feeding her droppers of goat’s milk. Sneaking her into her Mama to eat between her pushy siblings.

When I watched her weasel her own way into nurse the day before we left, something inside of me that I refused to acknowledge was broken, healed a little.

Knowing I saved her carried me.

Weeks after we had gone home, she went undetected in the tall grasses I left her playing in and wasn’t fast enough to avoid a ride-on lawnmower. The gory news was relayed to me months after, casually at dinner. Over the clinking of forks and rounded spoonfuls of instant mashed potatoes, the entire world slowed.

I saved her, and then she was killed.

It haunts me 30 years later.

Was it worth it?

---

Andre de Shields is a Broadway legend, the likes of which we may never see again. When my Mom heard it was his last go around on Hadestown, a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, she bought us tickets so I could see his brilliance up close.

As a literature teacher who had taught Greek myth for over a decade, I already knew the outcome wasn’t a good one. I rehearsed the deaths over and over on the train into Penn Station, like I have always done, to be prepared.

And I was prepared for the loss. The sadness that came from knowing that Orpheus and Eurydice will live forever separated. But I was not prepared for Mr. de Shields resounding echo:

It’s a sad song, but we sing it anyway.

Not, it’s a sad song so we listen quietly, paying our respects. Not, it’s a sad song so we sit it out and allow it to run it’s course, defeated from the start. Not, it’s a sad song so we give up at the coda and hope for the best, expect the worst.

But we SING it. We sing it. With wild abandon. With keen irrationality. Like spending your last remaining 3.45 on a strawberry sundae from Dairy Queen. We SING it. Collectively, joining a chorus of others, dying beside us. We SING it.

Tears ran down my face at curtain call and while in part, it was for the reality of the separation of love, it was also in surprise. Against my defeatest, pessimistic world view, I found myself believing Andre’s last, echoing edict. The story- their story- after all of the struggle, turmoil, and loss, was still worth telling.

---

I’m taking a hiatus from social media for the rest of 2024 in an attempt to be kind to myself, and also to lean in to some other creative projects that do not need an audience to the process.

It may be the longest I’ve ever stepped away, and to be honest, it feels like (as a writer) I’m shooting myself in the foot to disappear for a bit when all of the messaging I’ve ever received about pursuing publication is to remain as visible as possible. But it calls, so I’ll answer. This is what writers do.

I’m thrilled to continue to thrive here in this space, however. Thank you to those who are new and old who join me.

“It’s a sad song, but we sing it anyway.”- HADESTOWN