Composed: A Memoir

by Rosanne Cash

I have learned more from songs than I ever did from any teacher in school.

As Bruce Springsteen—one of the most family-inspired songwriters of the last two decades—said in “Highway Patrolman,” “Nothing feels better than blood on blood.”

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.”

what she did when she lifted you up was to mirror the very best parts of you back to yourself.

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 have taken every sorrow of my life to the ocean—the

There is not meaning in everything, but one can ascribe meaning to anything. Therein is the beauty.

“The gloaming of the day is the hardest part.”

What will survive of us is love.

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.

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.

For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.