January 19, 2016

I dislike these musical tributes because they are happening far too frequently as of late.  Yesterday, Glenn Frey left this Earth.  

 I understand Death as much as a human can – I get it that we are all on our way out the second we land, and I was fine…really, until… I was picking up the kids from school quickly before Part Two at work when I switched radio stations and there was another tribute for another musician who changed many lives. 

They were playing “Desperado”, and suddenly there I was, 17 years old, sitting in a Young Life meeting because someone had suggested it to my mom, saying how it had saved her kid.  I was the only one in a chair, surrounded by kids I had gone to school with for years, my arms folded on my lap with gauze bandages wrapped loosely around my sliced-up wrists.  Tears rolled down my cheeks as a slide show was accompanied by “Desperado”.  That songs gets me every time I hear it because of that one moment in time – the first of many future suicide attempts – I was trapped in a hell I couldn’t get out of…yet.

I explained this to my kids as tears fell on my lap as I drove them home.  I do not hide my history from my children, expecially the parts which were such turning points in my life that they are forever frozen in time.

Many years and many dark roads later, I found my rainbow – well, most of it, anyway.    I’m another one of those people you wrote the song “to”.   Thank you, Mr. Frey, for your part in a something that had a very deep impact on my life.

Picture: Storm clouds moving