You’re Gonna Miss This

Last night around 9 PM, I was lying in bed, legs outstretched and crossed at the feet, right hand resting comfortably between the back of my head and the pillow, tiny white earbud headphones placed snugly in my ears as I listened to the sounds emanating from my metallic blue iPod Shuffle. As usual, my ears were being treated to an eclectic array of musicians and singers, artists as diverse in style and substance as Steve Miller, Fiona Apple, William Hung, Kings of Leon, and Britney Spears.

About half an hour into my listening session, a Trace Adkins song began to play. I discovered Trace about a year or so ago when he appeared on Celebrity Apprentice. He seemed like a decent, stand-up guy with a really deep voice so I took a chance and purchased his greatest hits CD. Well, that disc stayed in our car, and in heavy rotation, for well over a month.

During that period of time, one song in particular had me in an emotional stranglehold. Whenever I would hear “You’re Gonna Miss This”, no matter what kind of mood I was in, happy, sad, content, or utterly indifferent, I would break down and cry uncontrollably. The crying would turn into hysterical sobbing as the song played on. By the end, I could dial my emotions down enough so that all I was left with was the occasional leaky eye and a serious case of the post-bawling sniffles.

Why did this song affect me so much? First and foremost, it’s an extremely well-written and expertly crafted song that not only succeeds in telling it’s own specific story, but it is also able to branch out and transform and apply itself to the listener’s breadth of experience as well. Then, if you factor in that it had only been about a month into my being told by numerous experts that I did indeed have an incurable, terminal disease, and that being told you’re dying doesn’t make living in the here and now any easier because all I was doing was thinking about what I could potentially be missing out on, all the while knowing both in my head and heart that these were the easy days of my illness where I still had nearly all of my speech, movement, swallowing, and breathing abilities more or less intact.

So, yeah, that’s why I cried.

But an interesting thing occurred last night when that song came on my Shuffle: I didn’t cry. I mean, it wasn’t even close. No quivering lips, no squinting eyes, nothing. As the song played in my ears, I found myself being transported to the time and place over a year ago in our car when I was powerless to control the surge of emotions as they washed over me.

From above, I watched myself crying and I remembered how it felt to be living my life then. And then I thought about how it feels to be me now and that despite my setbacks, my life is pretty damn good these days. Enough time has elapsed between then and now to provide me with the proper perspective to realize that while my feelings of mood-altering panic and infinite sadness were completely valid in that space and time, it’s okay to have moved beyond that specific set of emotions.

In fact, it’s more than okay, it’s completely normal.

Grrrrr. Click here to connect to youtube to watch the video. Sorry about that.

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