Losing and Finding our Loved Ones

By Ann Heaton

Years ago, while on tour, I arrived at my parents’ house to spend the night after a Chicago performance. I was traveling with a guitarist named Frank who was new to my world. My parents knew him a little, but not well.

When Frank and I arrived at the back door of the house around 1am, my dad came to let us in. Sleepy and wearing his Kelly-green bathrobe, my dad greeted Frank with a huge hug saying, “Hello Frank.” Not known for being a hugger, he expressed a level of familiarity that surprised me. I remember thinking, “my dad is treating Frank like he’s a member of the family.”

In college, I loved reading Immanuel Kant. I was taken with his idea that time and space are not objective realities, but formats through which we experience our lives. Later, in reading about general relativity, I marveled that on some level, the past, present, and future co-exist. “How could this be?” I wondered. It made sense that we needed space and time to organize our experiences, but was there something to perceive beyond these frameworks?

I didn’t know, but looking back, my dad’s hug feels prescient. It was like a future version of my dad stepped back through time to hug Frank who would one day, unbeknownst to us, become my husband. In my father’s sleepy state, he connected to something timeless, a knowing that Frank was family.

Many years later, my baby nephew died. As I watched my brother and sister-in-law suffer their immense grief, I wanted to be there for them. I turned to friends for help. A lot of my same-age best friends were pregnant or trying to get pregnant. While they offered to listen, I felt uncomfortable sharing the depth of my sadness with them. Instead, I called my parents’ 60-70-year-old friends who’d been alive long enough to have suffered many losses. They offered perspective the best they could.

I did feel a strong urge to call one person closer to my age, a woman named Kate. I didn’t know Kate well. I met her when she was a college student in Indiana and when she attended some of our concerts there. Over time, we got to know each other better by chit-chatting over the merch table after shows.

Walking in my neighborhood one day, cutting the corner through a church parking lot, I argued with myself:

One part said, “Kate will understand how horrible this is and she won’t be afraid to talk about it.”

Another part asked, “Why would she understand?! She has a healthy and happy one-year-old daughter.” “Also,” I reprimanded myself, “you don’t know her very well!”

By the end of my walk, I’d decided to leave Kate alone, but the thought kept coming, “talk to Kate, she’ll understand.”

Twenty-two months later, Kate’s son died one day before he was born.

When I heard the news, it felt like someone knocked my legs out from beneath me. I was heartbroken and angry. “Why, why, why, did this happen to Kate and her loving family?” After some time, I also felt unease over my earlier feeling that Kate would’ve been an empathetic listener about my baby nephew’s passing.

Most of me knew that I’d been drawn to reach out to Kate because she was a kind person who never sugar-coated things or pretended life was easier than it is. She was honest, open, and not uncomfortable with tough topics. “There’s nothing more to it than that,” I told myself.

Still, a small part of me wondered why I’d felt that Kate would have deep compassion and wisdom around losing a child before she’d had the experience.

Could a future version of me and a future version of Kate have been connected in some way?

Was it that painful emotions reverberate through time?

It seemed fitting that searing pain could cut through the veil, reaching further back in timethan other, less agonizing, experiences.

I couldn’t have predicted when my nephew died that one day I’d introduce Kate to my sister-in-law Meaghan and that they would choose to meet up to share their grief.

On the night Frank and I arrived late at my parents’ back door (circa 1999), we couldn’t have known that we’d one day raise two daughters together.

I wondered: Does one part of us exist in time where we learn as we go (and we don’t know what we haven’t learned yet), while another part of us (the soul perhaps?) exists in wholeness, outside of time, already knowing on some level all the things we’ll come to learn?

Do we catch glimpses of this outside of time (soul) part every once in a while?

A few weeks ago, while driving home from a Katie Dahl and Julie Wolf concert in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I felt a yearning. I missed someone. I reached for my phone to call this person I missed, but discovered I didn’t know who it was. “Who is it that I’m missing?” I wondered. “Who do I want to call?” Then I remembered that I used to have this feeling frequently when I was in my thirties, but it’d been a while since I’d felt it.

Then it dawned on me. If peeking through the veil of time is possible, then might it also be possible to miss people we haven’t yet met? If time is simply a format, and everything, in all timeframes, coexists, then aren’t we already connected to people from our future?

In my thirties, could I have been missing my children who weren’t yet born? These days I can’t imagine living without them. Maybe back then, it was also hard to live without them. Maybe my mind just didn’t know why my heart ached

It’s a leap, I know. And yet, much of the music also seems to come through the veil. Songs arrive right on time. Songs know things before I do. Songs present maps to help me (or others) navigate what is coming. How do the songs know how to do this?

What would a song from the future say to you?

Editor Note:  This essay was submitted by Ann from her Substack site which can be found here.