Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy, RIP
Upon hearing of the sudden death of Irish musician Glen Hansard
As I was sitting down to write this, excited to share with you important numbers and facts from the estate planning workshop I attended last week, I heard of Glen Hansard’s sudden death earlier today outside Dublin.
If you haven’t seen the movie Once, I highly recommend it.
Bring Kleenex.
If you haven’t seen The Commitments, I highly recommend that as well, for Hansard’s part as the long-haired guitarist Outspan “Fender Bender” Foster (It’s also hilarious and has one of the best soundtracks ever).
We often don’t think of death until it surprises us.
Which of course it shouldn’t, because death is more certain than taxes, putting the USB port in the wrong way, and the toast falling jelly-side down.
Hansard was only 56; it always hits differently when you hear that someone younger than you has died, doesn’t it?
And with musicians and actors, we often feel a personal loss when we never even knew them in life.
When a movie or a song comes at a particular time in our life, it embeds itself in our heart and soul. We see the movie over and over again; we put the song on repeat on our record player/CD/streaming device. We sing it in the car and the shower and when we’re sauteeing onions. It worms its way into our nervous system until we know it as well as we know our own phone number. We can Name That Tune in three notes.
Then, in the course of the day-to-day, it slips out of our consciousness. We move on to another song, another movie, another set of memories, and that particular song is forgotten. Until something happens to blast it back into our awareness, and we are swept up in a rogue wave of memories that can knock you over.
Once - I saw the movie AND the Broadway musical, and the album sat in my CD player and on my ipod for months - was a big chunk of my personal soundtrack in the mid-aughts and then again in 2014 when I saw the musical. Right around when The Commitments came out in 1991, I got my first tattoo (an Irish harp!)
I also have deeply beautiful and bittersweet memories of Dublin and environs, which include grief over friendships that ended through death or division. Even now, years (decades) later, every time I hear a song from these movies it instantly takes me back to smoky pubs, Guinness, and guitars.
In the interest of full transparency, I don’t feel like writing about wills and trusts and how much we Pennsylvanians have to pay in inheritance taxes when we die. I feel like watching Once (and maybe The Commitments while I’m at it), drinking a pint of stout, and honoring Glen Hansard and what his music and movies meant to me.
I encourage you to take a moment today or tomorrow and listen to a song that means something to you. We don’t need to wallow in our memories, but revisiting them can be a kind of renewal.
We all need a little tenderness, sometimes.
See you next week.