When my mom died, I didn’t know if I could sing for her even though I do it for a living

Essay by Lauren DePino, CNN

(CNN) — On the morning of my mom’s funeral, I arrived at the church before everyone else. Soon, people would begin trickling in. But first, I needed a moment alone with my mom. I didn’t know if I had it in me to sing for her that day, and I was nearly at zero hour.

A blur of days before, on the night of the summer solstice — the shortest night of the year and the longest night of my life — a phone call jarred me awake with news that stunned me. My mom had coded, and paramedics were trying to revive her. As I stumbled to the car, I cried out to her, knowing she would never answer my cry for her again. Still, l prayed that I was wrong.

Even though I had moved across the country a decade ago, I talked to her every day and saw her multiple times a year for winter visits in Florida, the holidays in my hometown of Philadelphia, and summer visits at the Jersey Shore.

Now, in the Roman Catholic church of both of our childhoods, in the second pew where my mom always sat, I asked for her guidance. How could I not sing for her at the singular occasion that honored her life? The truth was, I was terrified that my voice would crack and I’d ruin her service. At the time, I hadn’t yet processed my most crushing fear — that I’d be forced to live without her.

I pictured her large, dark eyes fixed on me during the hundreds of times I’d sung here for funerals and other gatherings. I saw her reddish-brown curls, her mouth mirroring the lyrics. The stained-glass rainbows falling on her arms. If my voice could really reach her and she could really reach me back, this was the spot for it.

The dirge-crooning daughter

This church was where I’d started singing at funerals 33 years ago, when I was 10. For more than two decades, I was the dirge-crooning daughter of a lively, outspoken mother who hated funerals and just about anything to do with them, especially those wretched wallet-size remembrance cards.

But boy, did she love the music. And she always showed up to hear me sing.

When I sang a set of comfort songs — whether it was at a banquet hall, in a grassy yard or in this very church, she’d often sneak in the back, wearing black, making her way close to my musical post.

Most recently, I would sing and play for her at her independent living complex, seated at the grand piano in the community room.

From the front row, she would shout, “‘Be Not Afraid’!” as if she were requesting “Free Bird.” With her eyes closed, she conducted to her own rhythm.

Would my mother tell me what to do?

I sat in mom’s seat, as stumped as ever, unable to sense any heavenly messages from her. I thought of the earthly guidance I’d received from Meghan Riordan Jarvis, a trauma-informed grief expert, and Mary-Frances O’Connor, a neuroscientist and clinical professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.

While I was a professional funeral singer, Jarvis pointed out that I was not a professional griever. I had told Jarvis about my fear of not knowing how my grief would play out during the funeral.

“We have these ideas that are based on past experiences of how we are going to handle something, but profound attachment loss is a true novelty,” she told me.

She explained that, when we are hungry and feed ourselves, we can generally predict the result: We’ll feel sated. But, with grief, there is a limit to our ability to imagine what it will look like. Yet one thing we can know, Jarvis said, is that we’ll be “in a period of both letting go and becoming.”

In the church, I heard the familiar clicking on of pendant lights, followed by the echoed footsteps of funeral guests. The music director, a longtime friend, would be here any minute. We’d left it that I might sing, but she would cover me if I couldn’t. I took a shallow breath.

There was a level of suppression necessary for me to witness other daughters facing their agonizing goodbyes to their mothers. But now that I was one of those daughters, I couldn’t fathom being a mourner and a funeral singer at the same time, whatever Jarvis had promised me.

I felt my musician friend’s hand on my shoulder. “How are you feeling about singing?” She switched on the mic. “You can sit with your family if you want.”

“I want to sit where I always sit,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t notice I’d dodged her question. Without a word, she sat at the piano and I placed my hymnal on the podium. Just in case, I opened to “Be Not Afraid,” the song I’d chosen as the entrance hymn. I looked past my mom’s empty seat and saw two childhood friends. I walked over to them.

Before I could process what was happening, I was caught in a stream of hugs — from them, from cousins, from a woman who did Zumba with my mom. From my mom’s maid of honor, 63 years earlier in this same church. From the tax man. From her former high school English students who said my mom had transformed the trajectories of their lives.

The possibility for more than just pain

I headed back to the podium, a little less scared, and stared again at my mother’s seat, then the pages of “Be Not Afraid.” An astonishing calm came over me, and like a surfer betting on the curve of a wave, I went for it.

My mom would have wanted me to sing, and I owed it to her to try — or I risked regretting it forever. I hadn’t slept the night before, and yet I had already accomplished the impossible task of getting to this church to honor my mother and my grief. Why not try for the next big impossible step?

Jarvis had cautioned me against self-judgment if I were to cry while singing. “It wouldn’t be a failure. It would be very moving in its own way if you couldn’t get through the song but tried anyway, right?”

I gave my friend at the piano a nod, and she began to play. As my voice rang out, I felt held, steadied. Lifted and infinite. I am not sure if I sang well.

Soon it was time for another one of my mom’s most loved songs, “Prayer of St. Francis,” and I whispered to my friend that I would sing it, too.

Instead of trying to squelch my grief, I stared at the spot where my mom would sit, letting in any memory that wanted to surface. I saw my mom storm down the aisle and out of the church when a priest had delivered a sexist homily, and I’d watched, slightly embarrassed but mostly admiring.

I saw her, my chest catching, at her own mother’s funeral, her swollen under eyes glassy with tears.

I sensed her, somehow, nodding in recognition, as my singing for her was unexpectedly holding me up instead of breaking me down, helping me bear the loss of her.

The mysterious place where grief and awe live

Weeks later, I shared my surprise with O’Connor.

“I think we can show up best when we are truly showing up, truly present in the moment with all the joy and grief it contains,” she said. “The love of another human being can inspire us to be courageous, whether they are on this earth or have left it.”

I still wondered — what if my singing had elicited feral tears after all? If I had fled the platform, who would have judged me? Not the people who loved my mom. Only me. I had been approaching this dilemma from what I thought was my ego, but what Jarvis later clarified was my self-consciousness about showing my vulnerability.

Somewhere along the path of letting go and becoming, I had decided to source my energy from somewhere else — from the mysterious, magical place where grief lives — the same place where awe lives, which is where my mom probably lives. In my mother’s household, I learned I could perform impossible acts even when — especially when — the sting of life left me reeling. When I’d tried my best and failed woefully, to her I had been victorious by just putting myself out there.

My mom believed we dwell in a world where people’s beloved mothers die, an event that devastates — and yet, we “stagger onward rejoicing,” to draw on a phrase she recited often from W.H. Auden’s poem “Atlantis.”

All of it is real, all of it is life, all of it is awe. When it came down to it, there had been too much beauty and magic in our mother-daughter bond to not at least try to sing for her. And now it seemed beauty and magic lived within my immediate grief for her, something I would have vowed before her funeral was nearly impossible.

O’Connor reinforced the benefits of giving ourselves permission to feel our grief and transforming that grief into art. “The love we feel for those we are close with, and feeling that love overwhelmingly in the midst of grief, can be the greatest motivation for beautiful creativity,” she said. “There is a difference between being alive in the moment and making a polished performance, and sometimes grief adds the spark that makes art beautiful, even if that were to end in tears.”

I asked Jarvis if my grief, this early on, might resemble hope.

Of course Jarvis said yes. “The sorrow is predictable. But grief will give you so much more than sorrow. It always does.”

With Christmas approaching, I dreaded spending it without my mom. But because of what happened at her funeral, I wondered if something positive could happen then, too.

“Absolutely,” Jarvis said. “You are beginning to open up to the possibility that there will be more than just pain. And that is what living with grief is. Grief does not only break us down. Since you don’t know this soil and you don’t know these seeds, things will grow in you that you never expected that are going to be so beautiful.”

What I had imagined I most wanted to accomplish at my mother’s funeral was to please her. But I also wanted to genuinely ask myself, “What did my grief need from me?”

I got my answer: It needed me to sing, no matter the result.

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