I found out recently that an old friend of mine from Harvard passed away a few weeks ago. Jesse was 30 and had pancreatic cancer. We hadn’t really kept in touch since leaving Harvard 7 years ago, but just the thought of such a fine human being such as Jesse not being around anymore is completely heartbreaking.
I have vivid dreams that I remember fairly clearly. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of one but if I lay back down and will the next part on, the story of my dream continues. Early this morning I dreamt that I saved a little boy’s life, over the course of a weekend, simply by playing him the most beautiful songs that my ITunes possesses. Belle & Sebastian, Camera Obscura, Magnetic Fields, Jens Lekman, Yo La Tengo, Nico, Bettye Lavette, Architecture in Helsinki, Neutral Milk Hotel, Elliot Smith, all comprised of the soundtrack to saving a life.
Imagine that, if music could really save a life that was slowing or quickly slipping away.
I imagine that as Jesse passed away with his mother by his side, he laid by the beach in Jamaica, taking in the view of the beach and the smell of the salty air. I don’t know what songs may have been playing recently or near him or what notes he had running through his weary mind. In my dreams, my soundtrack could bring Jesse back to Jamaica, to his family and to the things he loved to do.
However, this ability is only dreamt up, a weak consolation for all the things that I hope one day science and technology can really do. Or perhaps they can, one day, extract the magic of music and pump it directly into our bloodstreams, our spines, our synapses so that we can be made whole again.
Jesse passed away the day that he was to return to Massachusetts. I’m sure that he felt like Jamaica was home to him already. You can see it in the photos posted on the Facebook Jesse Lovers page. I’m sure that the soundtrack that saved his life comprised of the voices of his loved ones and maybe the beating of drums. And in my dreams, Yo La Tengo played for him, by his bedside, this song, and he put his feet firmly on the ground and walked forward.
