Death Concert

As mentioned in my post, "Say Yes!," I was invited to play piano for someone's conscious death through euthanasia. So yesterday morning, I packed some music books and in the 20 minute drive to the apartment, listened to a recording called Adagio by Bizet. While driving on Sunset Blvd., the morning light streaming through the trees, I imagined I was driving to my own appointment with the next world. As the strings swelled and receded and the sunlight sparkled, I could briefly imagine it as a joyful rendezvous. It was good preparation for what was to come. 

Finding parking, getting past the workers operating a giant crane, finding the right code to get into the building and the right code to get the elevator up to the 12th floor, all became minor obstacles that luckily proved easy to negotiate. And there I was, meeting the husband John and the voyager Jim (names changed) for the first time. Jim was lying comfortably in bed, looking complete normal, conscious and coherent, probably younger than me. I asked if he had any specific requests and he just suggested I play whatever I had played at the Jewish Home last Friday when he and John were listening from the second floor. He did ask if I knew one piece (Pia Jesus?) which I didn't and he began to sing it to me. It could have just been a casual visit, with no obvious indication that this was literally a life and death moment. 

Off I went to the piano outside his bedroom, a fine Yamaha electronic grand and began to play. Started with Bach's Prelude Number 1 to set the tone and went on from there for over two hours without stopping. John would come out occasionally and confirm that he and Jim and Jim's cousin were loving it all, with tears in his eyes and his hand over his heart. And so on I played.

At first I thought the music should lean more towards what I called introverted pieces, those slower tempo, less cluttered, classically beautiful melodies that turn us inward and help us halt the onslaught of random sensation and breathe a bit deeper into the moment. But as I intuitively moved between various classical styles, ragtime and jazz, I realized that every piece can have its place. It was the slow motion equivalent of one's life flashing before one's eyes with a review of all the feelings a human being can hold. So why not a Scott Joplin ragtime piece, a Thelonious Monk blues, a Strauss waltz, a Bach fugue, a Jobim Bossa nova? In short, exactly the same kind of variety I offer each week at the Jewish Home, the same I offered in my recent house concert. If indeed, each piece of music rightly heard unlocks another faculty of soul, why not explore the whole spectrum?

Without Jim in the same room, the dramatic setting for the music was a bit removed, but still I could feel it and vowed to honor it by simply playing with my whole self, savor each note and give it its full expressive quality. Behind me was a view out to the ocean and the beginning of a rainstorm, around me was all the gorgeous sound so meticulously crafted and created by the genius of extraordinary human beings and this humble fellow trying to do it justice. Many moments where my own tears came forward, particularly with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Debussy's Clair de Lune, Gershwin's Embraceable You and Bach's opening Cello Suite. 

After playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, I segued briefly into Bach's Joy of Man's Desiring and from there back to where I started, his Prelude No. 1. John came out and we both acknowledged that it felt like the moment to stop. The euthanasia drugs were doing their job, but Jim was still with us. I asked to see him and went by his bedside to hold his hand, even as he seemed in a coma-like state and his complexion growing pale. I told him I hoped the music helped him release into the waiting arms of the next world, where others were waiting to greet him. John pointed to the photos of his parents looking over them and affirmed, "Yes, they are." And I left.

I had never done anything like this before and it's likely I will never do anything like it again. (Though open to it, should the opportunity arise.) In some ways, it was intensely dramatic and in other ways, not so much. Why? Because I realized that every time I play, whether all those mornings at The San Francisco School before the kids came in for class or at the end of the Levels Trainings when people lie down under the piano in the darkened room while I play or every week at the Jewish Home or in the recent House Concert, it's all a Death Concert. As serious as imagining that this might be the last music we ever hear and both playing and listening with that kind of intensity. The kind of atmosphere that Keith Jarrett creates in his solo concerts, Yo Yo Ma evokes whenever he's on stage, Bobby McFerrin invites us to experience as he helps us release all our unsung songs. 

More to say about it all. For now, enough.