Somewhere Down the Road

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I started listening to Amy Grant's new CD, Somewhere Down the Road, today, and it really took me back. I've always loved Amy's music: both the fun upbeat songs and the deep meaningful ones. Because Amy's just a few years older than I am, her albums always seemed to speak to where I was in life. I could tell my whole life's story through a retrospective of her music.

One of the new songs on her album is called "Unafraid." In it she writes: "My lovely mother's getting on in years, and the way her body's aging brings her girls to tears. The way she trembles with each effort she makes, She just says heaven's getting closer each day." This made me think of my own mom, the year before she died, when Alzheimer's was taking its toll. We were visiting her house, my two sisters and me, and she was struggling to put on a shirt right. She was stuck, but she was laughing and we were laughing, and we gathered around her, helping her out and enjoying being together, even in these circumstances. And yet I had a pang in my heart, thinking how lucky she was to have three daughters who loved her and who would walk with her through this. And I felt so sad for myself, who would most likely be making that difficult walk alone.

That in turn reminded me of my heartbreak when I lost my children at different stages of pregnancy. For some reason the first one, our little son, was the hardest. We had tried to get pregnant for several years, and now I was safely into the second trimester, so full of love for this child of ours. When he mysteriously died I was struck down with grief, tears pouring out of me for weeks on end. Not long after that, Amy put out a song called "Somewhere Down the Road," which is reproduced on this new album (and gives it its title). This song expressed so perfectly how I felt: "So much pain and no good reason why. You've cried until the tears run dry. And nothing here can make you understand. The one thing that you held so dear is slipping from your hands. And you say, Why why why does it go this way?"

Losing my firstborn was the bitterest pill I'd ever swallowed. And as the years went on and I lost two more children, I struggled to make peace with the realization that we wouldn't have a family of our own. But I knew I was lucky in so many other ways: with a husband I loved, good friends, a life of peace and plenty. Life doles out injustices far worse than mine, and to live at all is to live in a world where suffering can come at any time, to anyone.

I learned a lot through my losses. I began to understand the wisdom that others have distilled for centuries before me: things like "Life is suffering." Like "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." And several years later I saw Amy Grant at a country music awards show. She was the first recipient of a new humanitarian award named after Minnie Pearl. Minnie Pearl was actually a friend of Amy's family when she was growing up, and Amy named one of her daughters after her (using her real name, Sarah). When she gave her acceptance speech, Amy talked about Minnie, specifically how she always wanted to be married and have a family, and that didn't happen for her. "But," Amy said, "she played the cards she was dealt, beautifully."

Over the years, that's become my mantra. It's a good mantra for anyone. What else can you do with life, really? And I'm grateful for the artists--writers and musicians--whose work helps us process our own experiences and, hopefully, make the best of them.

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