Composed: A Memoir

by Rosanne Cash

What all those anxiously droned Acts of Contrition chiefly accomplished was to break me down, bruising my sense of self permanently. Or so I thought. In any case, they had the immediate effect of making me withdraw from the truth about myself for a very long time. The truth about me, as it turned out, was unacceptable not only to Catholicism but to adults in general. The truth about me was not meant to fit into the system of convent school, religion, contrition, or punition. None of that mattered. I was a writer. It would save me.

Someone once told me to perform to the six percent of the audience who are poets. I have this in my mind at some point every time I sing, but I often have to find that six percent by looking past those who are yawning, glazed over, distracted, unsettled; those who come to try to look through me to see my dad; and those who can’t respond to music but like the experience of sitting in a crowd with those who can. Sometimes, onstage, I am also one of those people who are yawning, glazed over, distracted, and unsettled. At some concerts I have felt as transparent as a pane of glass and haven’t been able to hear the music I’m making. Sometimes music has been so painful to me that I want nothing more than silence and the sound of waves. Sometimes the need to please the audience rises in me like bile and ruins everything. T-Bone Burnett, an old friend, once told Joe Henry, “Don’t stop working, just stop worrying,” advice that Joe passed on to me that has since become my mantra. Now, even when I do worry, I keep working. Work, I remind myself, is redemption.

In 2009, after nine months of courtship, she married Sam Rayner, a young British photographer who is Morrissey’s nephew, and moved to Manchester, England. (My friend Elvis Costello said, “In all the connections and interlocking branches of musical family trees, one would never have predicted that one.”)

in committing to artistic growth, you had to “refine your skills to support your instincts.”

Even today, if I do a show and don’t sing “The Wheel,” it is guaranteed that someone will find me, write me, or send a note backstage expressing disappointment and indignation that I neglected to perform the “most important song” in my repertoire. And repertoire is destiny.

This was largely how I felt about my voice—that it was undependable, beyond my control, somewhat embarrassing at times; if not too low, then too high; if not too soft, then too loud, or too harsh, or too wimpy. It was simply not enough, not right, and as such it exposed me far, far more than I could comfortably allow. It presented the perfect conundrum, and therefore an irresistible career choice.

It was never too late to undo who you had become.

my grandfather, Tom, the bespectacled insurance agent, master amateur magician, renowned rose breeder, and champion gin rummy player, took me to the park to feed the pigeons. He was sitting on a green bench, tossing seeds from a bag to the birds, which were flocking around his feet. He kept saying, “Look at the birds, Rosanne!” and I thought to myself, with a sharp clarity that I now spend most of my waking hours trying to recapture, Oh, I am supposed to pretend to be excited. I am supposed to act like a child. And so I did. I squealed obligingly, feigned alarm at the gathering birds, and pleased my grandfather. It was a bad way to start things off, actually—a compelling need to please people can be deadly.

. . . I said, “Well, June, who was it?” and she said, “Why, honey, it was a wrong number.” That was June. In her eyes, there were two kinds of people in the world: those she knew and loved, and those she didn’t know and loved. She looked for the best in everyone; it was a way of life for her. If you pointed out that a particular person was perhaps not totally deserving of her love, and might in fact be somewhat of a lout, she would say, “Well, honey, we just have to lift him up.”

She was forever lifting people up. It took me a long time to understand that what she did when she lifted you up was to mirror the very best parts of you back to yourself. She was like a spiritual detective: She saw into all your dark corners and deep recesses, saw your potential and your possible future, and the gifts you didn’t even know you possessed, and she “lifted them up” for you to see. She did it for all of us, daily, continuously.

He was a Baptist with the soul of a mystic. He was a poet who worked in the dirt.

An old Eskimo poem reads: Perhaps the light in the sky is not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.

I gave an old man the pleasure of thinking he had introduced me to birds, by being deceptively innocent, by acting a part, but I was wrong in thinking I had to live the rest of my life that way.

“I declare”: a great Southernism, and a poetic way to live.

It was a difficult day, the last day of my dad’s life, but not unbearable to me. The next day, the beginning of my dad in the past tense, was unbearable.

With time the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant. Or maybe poignancy isn’t the conclusion to grief. Maybe there is something beyond poignant that I haven’t experienced yet.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, the untruth. Perhaps we don’t get the whole truth until we can stand it, and perhaps no one can ever really stand it in the density of this physical existence. I have settled quietly on the untruth, and even found its equanimity in my daily life. In the untruth of my parents, there is still so much for me, so many acts of service, so much real impulse for goodness, no matter how thwarted or strained. I see them clearly now, flawed as they are, self-centered and driven, with incomprehensible missions and agendas, diving headlong into parenthood when they were barely out of adolescence, unsuited to the task but devoted and hopeful, and, ultimately, not even on this earth for me as much as for themselves, which is the hardest thing for a child to accept. But how we remember is as important as what we remember.

Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.

Newcomers here say they are surprised that we don’t all spill our September 11 stories at the first available opportunity, but we don’t. There seems to be an unacknowledged code of silence about what we each experienced that day and in the weeks that followed. We barely talk about it among ourselves.

In the months since my father’s passing I had come to understand that the loss of a parent expands you—or shrinks you, as the case may be—according to your own nature. If too much business is left unfinished, and guilt and regret take hold deep in the soul, mourning begins to diminish you, to constrict the heart, to truncate the vision of your own future, and to narrow the creative potential of the mind and spirit. If enough has been resolved—not everything, for everything will never be done, but just enough—then deep grief begins to transform the inner landscape, and space opens inside. You begin to realize that everyone has a tragedy, and that if he doesn’t, he will. You recognize how much is hidden behind the small courtesies and civilities of everyday existence. Deep sorrow and traces of great loss run through everyone’s lives, and yet they let others step into the elevator first, wave them ahead in a line of traffic, smile and greet their children and inquire about their lives, and never let on for a second that they, too, have lain awake at night in longing and regret, that they, too, have cried until it seemed impossible that one person could hold so many tears, that they, too, keep a picture of someone locked in their heart and bring it out in quiet, solitary moments to caress and remember. Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.

It’s a hard day, and for a while you wear it like an ill-fitting jacket, the day the offer of membership to the terrible club is first extended.

The following night, as I left the television stage after my song, I saw George standing in the wings, waiting to go on. He was clapping for me, but I shook my head and said despondently, “It wasn’t as good as rehearsal.” “It’s never as good as rehearsal,” he replied, and I saw then that he was nervous. George Harrison was nervous about appearing on a television show and performing a song. I thought about that so many years later, when I attended the memorial for him in Strawberry Fields in Central Park the first weekend of December 2001, a few days after he died of lung cancer. He didn’t take his Beatles baggage to the guest spot on the Carl Perkins television show, but was just in the moment, wanting to be good, like the rest of us.

We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen. The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person’s depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice; the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer’s unflinching eye. Art, in the larger sense, is the lifeline to which I cling in a confusing, unfair, sometimes dehumanizing world. In my childhood, the nuns and priests insisted, sometimes in a shrill and punitive tone, that religion was where God resided and where I might find transcendence. I was afraid they were correct for so many years, and that I was the one at fault for not being able to navigate the circuitry of dogma and ritual. For me, it turned out to be a decoy, a mirage framed in sound and fury. Art and music have proven to be more expansive, more forgiving, and more immediately alive. For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.

I want to know what lives behind language; I am both limited and ennobled by words and rhyme. The songs have been an attempt to discover the mysteries.

I am always a beginner, again and again. I work, even when I worry.