Angel From Maywood

Too many people are hearing the actual “…sound of loneliness,”(John Prine). I grieve for this, although nothing in my immediate personal life is causing such deep sorrow. I do miss my brother-in-law Michael and dear friend Gary who died within a week of each other in October, 2018, but my grief is for my sister and close friend Terry, because they are now widowed and alone in this time of Covid-19 lockdown.  

I grieve for the tremendous losses and suffering of patients caused by this plague. I grieve for the overwhelming suffering of our medical people, who are not only devastated by their inability to keep people alive, but because they now are having to virtually connect family members to their dying relatives. I grieve for those who are dying away from the comfort of loving touch, and for the family members kept away from those they are losing. I grieve for my country, losing it’s good soul and being slaughtered by the selfish greed of the evil that has entrenched itself.

When Bill Withers died, I wept and kept singing Lean on Me the song for our times. We all need somebody to lean on. Then John Prine died of Covid-19 just a few days later, and I couldn’t stop crying. The tears were certainly for him and his kind heart, his triumph over so many other illnesses, and his beautiful songs. He is now an angel from Maywood, who wrote (among many songs)  Angel from Montgomery, and Hello in There. He’s now “shaking the hand of G-d” a line from……I grew up in Maywood, Illinois. I was born 3 years before John, and because Maywood was the home of my childhood, I just felt a special connection, even though I’d never met him.

My tears were cathartic and a release for all the sad in me. The sad is ongoing, for all the reasons I listed.  I listen to Bill Withers’s & John Prine’s songs. We were all given the joy of their music.  And I am comforted that there are so many good people: we can say “Hello in There” to the lonely, and offer people “somebody to lean on.” And we can work to take back our democracy. That is solace.