05/09/2026
The Songs You Left Behind....
There was a time we sang to Rhinestone Cowboy,
when the West Coast stretched before us,
mile after mile beneath an open sky,
and you drove us through America
with stories and music for company.
I was young, but somehow I knew those journeys
would become the kind of memories
that never really end.
And then there was Wichita Lineman,
Glen Campbell drifting through the car
somewhere that seemed so fitting for that song.
I can still imagine us there, singing along together,
the landscape passing beyond the windows,
your voice joining mine.
Then there was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,
playing through the station wagon,
on those old 8 track cartridges that seemed so magical then.
The music crackled on our journeys,
and ordinary roads became adventures
because I was there with you.
You gave me Vincent,
not just as a song, but as something to carry in my own hands.
You taught me to play it on the piano, showing me the simple chords, the notes slowly finding their way beneath my fingers.
And now, whenever those notes return, so do you.
There was Golden Slumbers,
one of so many songs from the Abbey Road album
that you loved.
Perhaps you never imagined that one day those words would hold
a meaning neither of us could have known, we played it at your committal, and that slumber became farewell, and golden memories would be all I had left to hold.
When there was a party,
you would play Great Balls of Fire. You loved your rock and roll,
and you and Mum would jive together, laughing and dancing,
showing everyone else exactly how it was done.
Those were the nights when happiness filled the room,
when family gathered, when nobody cared who was watching,
and music made you young again.
Some songs become places.
Some become people.
And some become time itself.
Then came the day when the song, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
was playing as we prepared you to go into the hospice,
and you recognised it, and sang the words with tears in your eyes.
Whenever I hear some of these songs, it feels as though music is like everywhere we had ever been together, cars journeys, parties and places, family and laughter, Mum beside you, life still singing.
Then there was the family anthem
When I Leave the World Behind.
We would all sing it together, all of us, perhaps never thinking too carefully about the words.
But families have their own songs,
and sometimes only we can understand them when the years have passed.
There was Guantanamera,
which we could never quite sing when it went really low,
no matter how hard we tried.
And somehow that makes me smile now.
Because grief is strange like that, it brings back the little things,
the ridiculous things, the things that mattered without us knowing
they would matter forever.
Then came The Long and Winding Road.
I sang along to it crying, on the day you were led from the hospice by Gary, after your short battle had ended, and every mile felt like I took another step away from you.
Yet perhaps it was also the road all of us had travelled together,
through childhood and family times and through music,
during our time in America, through ordinary days that only became precious afterwards.
And then, as you entered the chapel, the day of your funeral,
we played My Way.
There could have been no other song.
Because if anyone lived a life that fitted those words, it was you.
You made memories without knowing that one day we would live inside them, as that was all we had.
You did it Your Way dad.
And now the songs are still here.
Perhaps that is the gift you left us:
not silence, or memories without sounds, but a soundtrack.
A lifetime held inside melodies, waiting in the smallest moments
to bring you home.
So when those songs play, I won't turn it down.
I'll listen, and I will sing, and turn the volume up, and there I am somewhere, on a long West Coast road, with the windows open
and the years falling away, I'll be beside you again.
And you'll be singing too.
