How Music Helps Us Grieve and Face Death

Thank you.

I have had two great teachers in my life: music and death.

The first I chose. The second chose me.

Death came to my door when I was traveling with my younger sister. A sudden and tragic accident ended her life. She was 23.

I did not know where to turn. I was shattered. I did not know how to put the pieces back together. But I turned to what I knew: music.

I would sit at the piano every day and play the pain through me.

We call music the language of emotion. We say it is the language that picks up when words sometimes fall short. They certainly fell short for me then.

Some people ask me, how does music have the power to evoke and hold so much emotion?

If we look at music as a language, it is very different from the one we speak every day. In our normal spoken language, whatever your native tongue is, we put one word in front of the other, one sentence in front of the other, one idea in front of the other. If more than one of us speaks at the same time, it is unintelligible. We call that noise.

But music is also linear. We put one note in front of the other, one musical phrase in front of the other. We call that melody. But when more than one voice happens at the same time, it is not noise. It is polyphony. It is harmony. It is music.

It can express something exponential. It expresses more than the sum of its parts.

Music is multidimensional, and that is why it is so powerful. Emotion is also multidimensional.

We might say we are going through a certain emotion. We might give it a name, a word, but it is never just that word. There is always more beneath the surface.

We might say we are experiencing sadness, but there is so much more beneath it. We might say we are experiencing anger, but there is so much more beneath it.

Music can somehow hold all of it, express all of it, and enable us to untangle all of it.

It gave expression to what I was going through.

Music also has a deep impact on the brain. For those science nerds out there, the part of our brain where we hold identity, the default mode network, or DMN, can be downregulated by music. It can blur the boundaries of our sense of self and create expansiveness, healing, and connection.

But throughout the arc of a musical journey, it can also upregulate the DMN. It can allow us to explore, reframe, and reimagine memory and meaning. There is healing in that.

On the other end of that journey, as music enabled me to open into what I was going through, I felt compelled to change my life and dedicate it to sharing this experience that had been so powerful for me. I had experienced it in the confines of my own home, in privacy, but I wanted to bring that practice and ritual out into the world.

This is what it looks like today.

Over a thousand concerts later, we bring 150 concerts each year to beaches and parks, from Central Park to Santa Monica Beach. We bring hundreds of people together each time for connection, healing, and community.

We do it as a silent concert, like you are about to experience now. Each participant receives headphones so they can have a direct, immediate, personal, and intimate experience of the sound. It will feel like I am playing just for you.

It also provides a sense of immersion. Whatever grief or challenge we are going through, we tend to find ourselves experiencing it in the privacy of our alone time, whether in our room or walking by ourselves on a beach.

But what if we could have that alone time together? There is real power in that.

That is what is happening at these events. Hundreds of thousands of people have now had this in-person experience of connection, and we continue.

It is not just on beaches and in parks. We bring it to senior care centers and to places where people cannot come to us.

Music has a profound and powerful effect. It creates connection. It gives people a soundtrack to their lives.

I remember a family attending, three generations all together. Afterwards, the grandmother came up to me and said, “I heard the soundtrack of all my generations, of all my life.” She had a beaming smile, with her little one running beside her.

I remember another woman, I think in her 80s, who came to me after a concert and said, “I’m no longer afraid of death.”

There is something to that.

For me, having experienced the harshness and brutality that life can offer has inspired me to create beauty. But not the pretty. The truly beautiful.

By that, I mean what brings the eternal and the ephemeral together into one experience. Music is that for me.

I hope we can feel together now whatever is right here. I invite you to put your headphones on. There is a volume control. Get comfortable. You are welcome to open or close your eyes.

Let’s begin.

I’ll see you all in the music.

Beauty carries, hidden in its radiance,
the ache of departure.

The blossom leaning toward its own falling.
A note dissolving into nothingness.

We mistake beauty for what stays.
But what if beauty is what remains?

What leaves us standing at the threshold, astonished
in the departing face of the world.

Not by keeping beauty,
but by being kept
by its brief, eternal hand.

Are we changed?

And still, beauty returns,
each fading giving rise
to another form of grace.

In this way, beauty is everywhere.

And so the heart burns.
The eye already knows.

Everything beautiful fades,
except beauty itself.

Beauty itself walks beside us,
disguised as change,
teaching us to fall in love with the passing world.