Unbest

Lyndsie Bourgon on The Black Keys’ “Everlasting Light” (from Brothers, 2010)
(iTunes, Rdio, Spotify) 

It was very early in the morning, when she took her last breath. 12:30 a.m. in mid-August, almost five months to the day that they found tumors on her lungs and ovaries. The evening before had been a flurry of phone calls cross-country—no, she wasn’t going to make it out this time. The liquid in her chest was drowning her, the chemo had swollen her legs into elephant stumps. She couldn’t walk. She was in a coma.

Then, inevitably, more phone call flurries and text messages, and it was early morning on a Friday and the weekend stretched ahead. They didn’t think she’d make it through the weekend, but it was time for her to go before it even started. The phone only ever buzzes so urgently when it’s bad news.

The first song I blasted, after hanging up, was an iTunes shuffle choice and it was the Black Keys’ “Everlasting Light” from their album Brothers.

Now, Brothers is a good album, and the Black Keys put on one hell of a great live show, but they had begun to irk me a bit. I had stopped listening to the band regularly months before. I thought all the songs sounded the same.

Everlasting Light is so obviously about comforting love. Likewise, to me it’s very clearly about comforting those left behind in death.

“Let me be your everlasting light / A train going away from pain / Love is the coal that makes this train roll/Let me be your everlasting light.”

It’s so heavy, this song. The instrumentals are so bass-heavy and his voice so high. It sounds like crying.

Had it not been mid-August, I would have thought that lyric absolutely ridiculous, so cheesy and obvious, and really couldn’t we try a bit of poetry? And now it’s all I can think of when I remember my family in the two front pews of a church, a church filled with 300 hundred people to say goodbye to a girl, a 20-year-old, with chilling blue eyes.

At least the pain was over. And at least there was love.

Lyndsie Bourgon is a freelance writer in Toronto. She tumbls here.