One of the first friends my parents reconnected with when they first moved to England the first time (i.e four years before I was born there) were the M____s. Dr. M. is about 9 years my dad's senior, and his wife is about a year younger than my mom, I think. However, since they had married when she was very, very young, and started a family almost immediately, their children were much older than my sister and I. M., their eldest son, is twelve years my sister's senior, which means he is just under twenty years older than me.
Despite the age difference, and possibly because I'd grown up and spent so much time around adults much, much older than myself, M. and I became close in sibling sort of way, especially the second time around we lived in England, when I was about ten years old (that, over the years morphed into a really good, peer friendship, the older I got). One of the things that we enjoyed spending time on was singing together; at the time, I was yet to become self-conscious about singing in public, and had a pretty decent voice, that complimented M.'s, since he a mostly a tenor with some countertenor tendencies, and I am (and was, even at that age) most definitely a contralto . M. was already well known in the community for having a truly lovely voice, and had recently taught himself guitar to accompany himself when he sang. We started practicing various songs together, and we became a fixed staple of the evening's programs whenever there was a B***'* community gathering. I started scouring music books and hymn books at school for non-denominational, and inspiring songs, which were the ones most requested by our faithful and faith loving audience. It was the only time in my life that I willingly sang out loud in front of an audience and actually looked forward to it.
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M.'s been battling a malignant brain tumor/cancer for the last year and has been spending a lot of time in the hospital, lately. He's planning to take a trip to England in about a month, hopefully when he gets over the latest bout of infection from the chemo. He's going to stay about six months, and if he makes it (alive) past that time, chances are he will stay there, and not come back. I think he is tired of the treatments and tired of the incessant hospital trips, which at this point are, at best, adding a few months to what time he has. He wants to spend his time that he is lucid with his family.
The hardest part of the whole diagnosis for him has been his inability to make music, anymore, whether by voice or by instrument (he is an accomplished violinist as well). It's very hard for me to talk to him and remember all those afternoons when he would delight in finding yet another song for us to practice, and now listen to him be able to barely speak above a whisper or know that he had to put his beloved violin and guitar away months ago, too uncoordinated and feeble to play anymore (it was actually his inability to play as well as he could that led to the diagnosis).
We don't have any recordings of the songs we sang together (which is strange, since I was mad on taping anything and everything with my beloved cassette recorder, back then). We'll never sing together again. But, to remind him of happier days, I put aside my [extreme] self consciousness and stubbornness, and recorded a couple of our greatest hits, so to speak, while playing along on the piano, for him at his request.
It was very lonely singing without him.
***
I don't know how many times we sang the two songs below, but no matter how recently we'd sung it, it always gave me a little thrill to sing these two. I'm not sure I'll ever really want to listen to them again, after this (especially the first one, which is also a huge favorite of my mom's.)
Dona, Dona (cover by Donovan)
Peace Train (Cat Stevens)
N.B. M___actually looked a lot like a younger (circa 70s) Cat Stevens, incidentally. We sang a lot of Stevens' songs, and he would definitely play up the similarity at times!
