Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother - Helen Humphreys ✔✔✔

Humphreys is a favorite Canadian author of mine - I loved The Lost Garden especially.  This was a very different book, since it is a letter to her brother Martin, a well-known Canadian pianist, RCM examiner, composer who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the summer of 2009 and who died in December of the same year at the age of 45.

There are some wonderful quotes I could copy here , on the themes of grief, dying, sibling love, but most especially about music.  Interestingly enough, one of Martin's favorite pieces was Debussy's Clair de Lune, which is also my "signature piece", and she even quotes the Paul Verlaine poem which was the basis for all of Suite Bergamasque.  But anyway, here are a few...

"Grief enjoys shorthand, that's what I'm thinking today.  Narrative is too fluid.  Grief is all chop, all rhythm and breaks, broken.  It is the lurch of the heart, not the steady beating of it."

"Maybe music is better company than writing because it makes a sound, takes up human space, a dimension in the world.  It releases emotion, whereas writing pins emotion down.  And all writing is necessarily elegaic."

"You must have felt both liberated and oppressed by the fact that the music lived through you, that you were responsible for making it happen, that without your body to animate it there was only silence"