i am not frightened of dying | any time will do

I think I listened to Pink Floyd’s Time over a hundred times the week after my father died. I wanted to hold onto something. I wanted to keep him with me. It didn’t do much to make me happier; the song haunts with its foreboding introduction while the low guitar mixed with bass and rhythm lands as a welcome, childlike on your chest, fading from speaker to speaker. All over the backing of a quick, steady heartbeat.

I talked to Dad quite a bit about his conceptualization of time. Always taking me seriously, he was; I loved when he talked me through metaphysical concepts with his godless, spiritual ease. This was before the cancer got so bad he was hardly lucid. In those days, he was bright eyed and thick haired in the pink guest room. Still sick, but able to pretend.

“When it hurts,” he said. “It’s as though it’s forever. Like the pain has always been there.”

But when I dripped blue liquid morphine into his open mouth, he drifted. I watched him fade into the black with each dose, becoming a part of a different time, a different perception.

When the verse drifts out of Time, Gilmour and Wright’s vocals weave together over a choral backing track and piece an image out of the ether. Organ chords wail, forlorn. Through the noise, something emerges—a hole in the speaker left empty, its edges raw and rippled. They have lost something to their past selves and they sing both an ode to the absence and a relief from the weight.

Time presided over caretaking. My days shifted from structural absence to ritual, meditative relief in the clock’s spin. I never had to make plans, for they were made for me by Dad’s needs. I didn’t have to wonder if I was doing the right thing. There was no right thing. There was nothing I could do for him that would stop it. I wonder if life can become too long or if it would have been better for Dad to have died quickly. We were thankful for it, prisoners grateful for a slow sentence because we never knew the firing squad.

There’s something to be said about the fact I remember less of Dad’s interactions with me and instead conceptualize him through the media we shared together. All I have left of him are titles—songs, albums, shows. Isn’t the experience of art in itself a memory?  I resist thinking about it. It opens to me the part of him we lost. Dad sank into art, giving a part of himself to its force. It was a vision I prefer to keep. The memories I have of him beyond that are spare.

The bridge in “Time“ is a prayer to itself. The lyrics are desperate. The song strives. And you find yourself remembering an old hand’s touch or a bearded grin.  

The first time I listened to Dark Side of the Moon, I was twelve and it was Christmas Eve. The outside smelled of damp and cold. It seeped through the windows every night, leaving the house bare in the morning when I’d wake up to the floor aglow with string lights. I was upset by myself and the world around me, at all times powerless to the surging emotions, the heavy sensations.

Dad stayed with me that night, shirking the family party. He put the original pressing of the vinyl on and warned me my life as I knew it would change. I would never think of music, of the album as a concept the same again.

Time, in its close, grants relief. Instrumentals drift in and out of focus. Pink Floyd calls the listener to their knees, as if in prayer. All preparation for the coming fever pitch in Great Gig in the Sky, fading to soft gray and reminding you to not be frightened, for it is only time.

None of us could find his copy of Dark Side of the Moon after Dad died. I looked for it over weeks and weeks, combing through his extensive collection—from Chet Atkins to the New York Symphony Orchestra—until I had to give up. He was nowhere.

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