STORIES @ MUSICIANS’ JOURNAL

I was invited to contribute to the new website, Musicians’ Journal, an online publication created for musicians to share their experiences, insights, and stories to serve as a record and resource for anyone interested in musicians’ lives and artistic process.

My first contribution to the site is about my experiences navigating the grief over the loss of my parents last year. An excerpt is below:

Me, my brother, and my parents

2024 was the tragic culmination of several extraordinarily difficult years for my family. After nearly three years of debilitating health crises, both of my parents passed away. My mother died in July after more than two years of being unable to eat, speak, or move the right side of her body following a catastrophic stroke in early 2022. My father, diagnosed with advanced and aggressive prostate cancer just two weeks after that stroke, succumbed to his illness a few days before Thanksgiving. We buried him the Tuesday before the holiday. I drove straight from the funeral luncheon to the airport and boarded a flight to Boston, arriving one day late to Messiah rehearsals already underway with the Handel and Haydn Society. 

Generous friends invited me to join their Thanksgiving dinners, but I was too exhausted and too stunned by the rapid succession of losses to imagine stepping into a celebratory gathering. Even though I’m fortunate to have a loving community of close friends in Boston, I needed solitude. My partner and I ended up having our holiday meal at the bar of our hotel. The next evening, I walked onto the stage of Boston Symphony Hall and implored a sold-out audience to “take comfort”, to trust that “the crooked shall be made straight, the rough places made plain”, and that all will be right with the world. From there, I barreled on to Messiah performances in Washington, DC and Hong Kong, and (one of the more surreal episodes of that December) jumped into a run of holiday performances in the Bay Area for a colleague whose own father had just died. 

As extreme as this sounds, it was, in some sense, the new normal…