The National, Mothers, And Brothers, by Paul Shirley

When my mother called, I was in my kitchen, making supper and listening to The National’s new album, High Violet, and wondering what I was going to write about it.

I could tell by the way she started the conversation that something was wrong.

Paul, I have terrible news.

I hit pause in the middle of “Bloodbuzz Ohio.”  I was pretty sure this was going to need my full attention.

My mother told me that my 17-year-old second cousin had died the night before.

Details were scarce.  His parents had been out of town and he’d left the house late at night in their car.  He’d crashed, but found his way home.  The police had discovered his body the next morning when they’d come to the house in search of the owner of the totaled vehicle.

I won’t pretend that I was especially close with my teenaged second cousin.  I’ve probably met him six times.  He wouldn’t have remembered three of those times; he was an infant or a toddler then.

Mostly, his family is close to mine in symmetry.  My parents have four boys, named Paul, Dan, Matt, and Tom.  His parents have – or sadly, had – three boys, named John, Tom, and Paul.  Like my brothers and me, their boys are smart and athletic – the oldest graduated from Penn, where he was a rower, and the middle son plays golf at Santa Clara.  The youngest – the other Paul – was a near-genius who, the last time I saw him, was showing off a tennis ball cannon he’d built from scratch out of PVC pipe and an air compressor.

As my mother relayed the details, or what she knew of them, I processed my own reaction.  How was I supposed to behave?  I was saddened by the story, but I couldn’t claim to be devastated.  I just didn’t know my familial namesake all that well.

Then my mother said something that interrupted my disembodied, frank analysis of my emotional reaction.

When [the deceased’s mother] called me, I told her I was probably the second-best person she could talk to at a time like this…

Wait, I thought, what does she mean?

She continued:

… and that my mother was the first-best person to talk to.

It dawned on me what she was talking about, but I hadn’t put it all together when she told me she needed to go and that she’d call me later.

When my mother was 19, her youngest brother – then 17 – died in a car accident while at home on Christmas break.  According to family lore, Jim was the embodiment of the American male – a strapping, handsome, intelligent young man destined for a great life.  Granted, everyone is mythologized in death but, based on what I’ve seen in pictures and heard in stories, the hyperbole surrounding him was mostly justified.

His death was a family tragedy, as any such death would be, but it was especially difficult because it came a short five years after the sudden death, from a heart attack, of my mother’s father, at 42.

As I ruminated on my family’s past, I put down the phone and hit play.  Matt Berninger’s gravelly voice finished “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and moved into “Lemonworld.”   I poured three fingers of bourbon over some ice and walked back to the kitchen counter, where I resumed cutting up the chicken breasts I was planning to grill on a beautiful May evening in Kansas City.

Alone with my thoughts, I had time to process what I’d just learned.  I thought about my brothers, the other Paul’s brothers and my mom’s brothers.

And then, as “Runaway” melted into “Conversation 16,” it happened.

I started crying.

With apologies to the family of my cousin, I wasn’t crying for their loss.  I was crying for my mother.

While telling me about talking to the other Paul’s mother, my own mother told me she’d said,

My god, I can’t imagine.  You must know that as every one of my sons hit that age, I worried myself to death as I thought about them driving.  I waited for just such a call.  And now it has really happened to you.

I cried because I felt guilty.  Guilty because I’ve lived a charmed life, when compared to my mother. Because of the pain my mother bore as a child, I’ve always expected something similar to happen to me. I’ve always been waiting for the other shoe to drop, as they say.

And guilty because it turns out I’d been just like every other child who’s ever lived: completely numb to his parents’ needs.  When I was 15, I was worried that Jessica Cordill would think I wasn’t cool because I was still riding the bus to school.  While my mom – projecting from her experience – was likely sure that any trip I might start in a car would end in an ambulance.

I cried out of relief, too.  Relief that my brothers have made it this far unscathed.  No car accidents.  No suicide attempts.  So far, no catastrophes.

While I was crying, and thinking, High Violet kept playing.  Making things worse, and making things better, at the same time.

Then, I made it to the last song on the album.  It’s called “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks.”   The title doesn’t do the song justice.  This lyric does:

All the very best of us,

string ourselves up for love.

I thought about what my family – especially my mother – has been through, in return for her love.  And I thought about what the other Paul’s mother must be going through, in return for hers.

I sipped my bourbon, and cried some more.

As anyone reading this already knows, life doesn’t go like we plan.

My cousin’s parents planned for him to live a long, interesting life that would conclude long after theirs did.

My mother planned to have her brother around for a lot longer than seventeen years.

And, perversely, she probably planned to outlive at least one of her sons.

By the end of “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” I knew what I would say about the National’s new album.  High Violet is the perfect accompaniment for living.  Like living, it’s melancholy, dark, and optimistic, all at once.

Because what is living if not recognizing that life is mostly things going the way we don’t want them to, and then figuring out how to deal with that.  Sometimes, the right coping mechanism is Sleigh Bells on the turntable, a case of champagne split with nine friends, and dancing the night away.

But other times – most other times, actually – what we need, when we think about living a life that presents the unbearable agony of brothers dying when they aren’t supposed to, but that also grants the joy and relief of brothers living whether they’re supposed to or not….

Well, for those times, there’s the National.

When the song finished, I drank the rest of my bourbon and picked up my phone again.  I sent a text to my brothers, thanking them, flippantly, for not dying in a car crash and telling them, seriously, that I loved them.

And then I walked into the night air.  And I grilled the chicken.  And I went on living.

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