Renie Goodnight

The last night I spent with Renie was a good one. It was the most lucid I saw her in that final part of the illness. She had shaken the morphine haze that she had been in when I arrived, and we had a nice little conversation that evening. We talked about her illness, and about my father. The content wasn't nearly so important to me as the fact that she was really *there* again -- a glimpse of the former Renie life-force. Then I helped her get ready for bed: I brought her her toothbrush and a warm wet cloth to wash her face. I sang her a lullaby -- the lullaby that my dad used to sing to me when I was a little girl.

And then she asked me to sing something more for her.

It was so quiet back there in her little room, and I felt my voice freeze in my throat. What should I sing? How could I break the silence? I couldn't think of anything. Nothing felt right. So I blushed. And she drifted off to sleep.

The next morning she was back in the nausea/exhaustion/drug haze. I said my goodbyes and headed for the airport, knowing it was the last time I'd see her.

I'm so thankful that I got that last time with her -- that I got to be there for some of her care at the end, and that I got that last little glimpse of Renie as herself, apart from the cancer. But it also breaks my heart a little bit that I didn't sing anything more for her. That I -- the musician, the girl raised on folk songs and singing -- couldn't sing her one last song.

In one of the verses from the old song Irene Goodnight there is a line that says, "but the very last words I heard her say were 'please sing me one last song.'"

.....

At some point this spring I decided that I wanted to write a piece to play on my Masters recital about Renie. As a music performance student, my Masters recital is considered my thesis -- and I wanted mine to really reflect my journey through the Masters degree. Renie's illness and death were a huge character through this part of my life, so I wanted that represented somehow. I started improvising, and planning. I worked on the piece as a sort of therapy. Playing and working on bits of it as breaks in my practice sessions.

As the recital neared, however, I couldn't get the piece to take shape. I had all of these improvised fragments that I had gathered, but I just couldn't bring myself to compose something out of them. And so I just didn't. As I told the audience at the recital: this isn't a composition so much as it is a conversation; a glimpse of the conversation that I'm having with myself, my grief, my memories.

So here's a live recording from the recital for you all to hear.

Renie Goodnight from Eleanor Graham on Vimeo.