There’s a Head and the Heart song titled “Heaven Go Easy On Me,” the closing track on their debut record. “Heaven” is an exploration of the first line of the song — “God, what are we doing?”
In the final minute, the song settles into a kind of echo of two refrains over and over: “All these things are rushing by me” and “All things must end, darlin’.”
I kept hearing the tension of those two lines as I read Didion’s observations in the year following the loss of her husband and illness of her daughter. There is the constant pull of the pace of the world, obdurate and indifferent, and the haunting reality of the stack of books left behind, the empty side of the bed, and, as Didion says, “the (im)possibility of response.”
We are simultaneously pulled forward and anchored. And so, how can anyone move on and get back on the treadmill of daily existence when the once distant reality that all things must end has touched down in your living room?
Gleam & Resonate 