Singing

I sing all the time. It drives the people I live with totally nuts sometimes. Mostly I will break randomly into song - some tune that has been on my mind, or that I just heard on the radio on the way home, or that my community was singing last Friday night. My son had a huge party last weekend and the last track danced at the party won't leave my head no matter how much I want it to, and as it happens I don't want it to as the party was the culmination of one of the happiest weekends we have spent as a family for quite a long time. And that last track, a beautiful, uplifting, upbeat melody, epitomised it. Music touches a part of my insides that nothing else can, and it has always been that way for me. Whenever I bake, I listen to music. Usually the cringiest kind of dance music, or sometimes I will have a culture buff moment and stick Radio 6 on or listen to some of my husband's more obscure but achingly cool Bloke Music. One of the main reasons why I don't cycle more often than I do is because it's too dangerous to wear headphones. My idea of nirvana would be to swim laps in a pool with underwater speakers. Piped music in hotel bathrooms is offputting to loads of people but I absolutely love it. I hum on my way to the station, sometimes actually sing out loud during my walks, to the consternation of random strangers on the path. I work out to high octane music and iron to classical music, paint my toenails to the beat and wash up to the latest in rock. My taste is not that discriminating. It just has to move me. I find those movies that end with someone singing, tears rolling down their cheeks, burningly cringy but that doesn't mean I don't believe it can happen. It is rare for a song to reduce me to tears. I mean, really rare. But last October my sister died, and her death prompted only the second period of my life when I was totally unable to sing. The first time, was just after I had my thyroids removed. I had to have them out because there was a malignant tumour on one of them. They took one out, tested it, it was confirmed malignant, so the other thyroid came out too. I spent time confined to bed with a tube coming out of my throat, and when I came home I rasped my words out for 2 weeks before my voice box began to recover from the trauma. Very quickly after that it returned to normal. Until one Friday night, when I opened my mouth to sing, as I do every Friday night (used to be a family sing song till my kids became old enough to exercise their right to bow out, which was about as soon as they decided we looked like the Family Von Trapp) - I opened my mouth to sing, and nothing came out. There was no singing voice at all. I was profoundly grief stricken for the first time in my whole cancer treatment. I had been entirely pragmatic about the removal of my thyroids, the necessity of radiotherapy, the compulsory thyroxine I would have to take every day for the rest of my life, the hundreds of scans to determine whether I had tumours anywhere else in my body (I didn't). But when I couldn't sing, I fell apart. It was a profound part of me, my ability to sing. I sing well - I have been in choirs, and sung solo on a stage, and played guitar around campfires, and induced an appreciation of music in my kids who both play instruments and sing beautifully when threatened - so it was a horrible loss of itself, but of course since singing has always been an expression of my emotions, not being able to sing, meant that outlet had been stoppered up. I wasn't having any of it of course. I found online exercises for the voice box, worked at them for a year, and got my voice back again. That is a a very short way of describing an arduous vocal physiotherapy process, but whatever, it had to be done, and when I was out the other side with my voice back, it wasn't as strong and it didn't have quite the range it used to, but it was still my voice. I had lost my confidence to perform too but that didn't matter. I put it to excellent use in the kitchen, the garden, the street, the gym - it felt like a triumphant end to my illness to be able to sing out. When my sister died, I was shellshocked while in mourning, and when mourning was over and I returned to my normal life, I couldn't just not sing, I couldn't listen to any music at all. Grief takes people in different ways and for me music tapped the core of my emotions in a way I simply could not manage. So I stopped singing. I used to attend a fantastic small singing group on Saturday mornings, but I stopped going. I would last about five minutes with my community - the minute they launched into the first chord of the first song I would be up with my bag and out the door reaching for tissues. It was unbearable. Then my son had his coming of age weekend, and the great joy I experienced for him and his achievements, transcended my grief. It was the first time since my sister's death that anything had done that. And I began to sing, just a bit. A few lines here. A verse there. I put my headphones back on. I switched on the radio. The house lost its silence, bit by bit (one of my kids plays the drums so it was never actually silent, but, you know.) I started visiting my piano. I still haven't actually sat at it to play anything, but I have sat at it, and looked at the keys. Which is something. Next month I plan to go back to the small singing group I was part of. It is as if the great time of joy we have just experienced has helped to rebalance, just a bit, the part of me that was knocked sideways by the loss of my sister.  Singing as healing. It's like the end of one of those movies.