My Life In 35 Songs, Track 31: “Passing Afternoon” by Iron & Wine

There are things that drift away, like our endless numbered days

“What song would you want to have played at your own funeral?”

Back in 2011, a friend and I decided to work through a 30-day song challenge on Facebook together, each of us posting one song per day in response to the same prompts. I have to chuckle in retrospect, realizing that the challenge bore more than a little resemblance to this series that I have spent the past seven months making my raison d’etre. That exercise was colder and more simplistic in its approach, though. Most days were less about deep emotional exorcism and more about the most rudimentary questions you could ask about someone’s music taste. “A song that reminds you of someone” was one prompt. “A song that you listen to when you’re sad” was another. But the overall idea of the project – essentially, selecting songs that for one reason or another were part of your life soundtrack – was the same as the driving force behind “My Life In 35 Songs.” And it stands to reason, when you’re making a soundtrack for your life, that you might flash-forward and try to imagine the song that would roll over your end credits, whenever they happen to arrive.

The ”funeral song” prompt was certainly the most morbid of that 30-day song challenge, but it was also, for me, one of the easiest to answer. Ever since the first time I’d heard it in early 2005, playing over the end credits of the Dennis Quaid/Topher Grace/Scarlett Johansson dramedy In Good Company, I’d known that Iron & Wine’s gorgeous nine-and-a-half-minute epic “The Trapeze Swinger” was my go-to celebration-of-life song. “Please remember me,” Iron & Wine mastermind Sam Beam sings repeatedly throughout the course of the song, at the start of eight consecutive verses. It’s a track about standing at the gates of heaven, your life flashing before your eyes, wishing you could say a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people who are now unreachable to you. I thought that, when the time came for me to reckon with mortality, “The Trapeze Swinger” would be a fitting send-off.

As it turned out, when death finally darkened my door, I did reach for an Iron & Wine song – just not the one I thought I would.

Here’s the thing: envisioning your own hypothetical funeral from the vantage point of 20 years old – the age I was at the time – is not usually a particularly soul-shaking experience. When you’re that age, you’re maybe a little past the delusions of invincibility that most teenagers carry with them, but you’re still so young and so early in your life’s story that your own funeral seems like little more than a shooting star off in the sky. It’s out there somewhere, certainly. But it’s (hopefully) many eons away, and there’s no need yet to worry about it (again, knock on wood). And so, I posted “The Trapeze Swinger” as my death song with as much consideration or gravity as I’d give to any other Facebook status update. It didn’t seem like a big deal, at all.

At that point in my life, the concept of death existed mostly as a hypothetical. All the people I knew and loved – my parents, my siblings, my friends, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my teachers – were still alive and well. The class ahead of me in high school – my wife’s class – had been plagued by multiple tragedies, and she already had too intimate a relationship with death, even in our early 20s. But the lone experience that I’d had with bidding farewell to a loved one had come in 2009, when, just a few weeks before I headed off to college, we had to put down Jessie, the family dog that had been with us since 1995. Jessie’s death was just about as beautiful as you could ask for: my mom and I said goodbye to her in a tranquil meadow on a gorgeous, late summer day, and I held her close, my face in her fur, as she departed this world. Losing her wrecked me, though. I remember trying to go to sleep that night and not being able to shake how utterly wrong it felt that this presence that had been in my life since I was four years old was no longer there. I hated that feeling more than anything I’d ever felt before. It reminded me of a Springsteen song: “You’re missing, when I shut out the lights/You’re missing, when I close my eyes/You’re missing, when I see the sunrise/You’re missing.”

You can get better at a lot of things in life, but I don’t think you ever get better at dealing with death. I know I won’t ever get better at it, and I think that’s actually a good thing. After losing Jessie, I would have done just about anything to stop feeling the agonizing weight of her absence. But 16 years and a lot more goodbyes later, I think that agony is a gift – or, at very least, a sign of something great. It wouldn’t hurt so bad unless you loved the person (or animal!) you just lost with all your heart and soul. I’d so much rather feel that pain a million more times in my life, if it means I loved deeply, than to never feel it at all.

Two of the best people I have ever known in my life were my grandparents on my mom’s side, and they, along with Jessie, marked my life’s first experiences with death. My grandpa passed away on October 2, 2014, at the age of 88. My grandma followed him six years and two days later, at 93. In both situations, I was lucky enough to see them one last time and say goodbye within their final 100 hours on this planet. In both situations, I knew they’d lived long, wonderful, fulfilling lives, filled with love, and family, and accomplishment, and that their time had simply come to move on. In both situations, I thought that me being fully at peace with their respective departures would shield me from complete and utter heartbreak. And in both situations, I was completely and utterly wrong.

There’s one other thing both of their deaths had in common: “Passing Afternoon,” by Iron & Wine.

There are a lot of songs that can put tears in my eyes just from hearing them. A smaller number can do it just from me thinking about the lyrics. “Passing Afternoon” might be the only song that can make me cry from simply reading the title. To me, those two words are the most simplistically profound phrase in the English language, at least in the hands of Sam Beam. In life, your youth is the morning, your final years are the twilight, and death is the night. Most of our existence, then, is spent in the passing afternoon – this seemingly long, languorous period that turns out to fly by as fast as a speeding car. “There are times that walk from you/Like some passing afternoon,” Beam sings at the beginning of the song. A verse later, it’s “There are things that drift away/Like our endless numbered days.” This song is all about the objects that seem like they should move at a leisurely pace, but end up passing you by before you can even blink. Such is life.

I think no matter how many times you lose people you love, you relearn the lessons of “Passing Afternoon” every single time. When my grandpa died in 2014, it shook me to my core because I realized how many of my fondest memories involved him. There’s this particular one that I’ve written about before, from a place where my family used to vacation on the shores of Lake Michigan. Back in the summer of 2005, we managed to convene the entire family there – my grandparents, their six kids and their respective spouses, and 15 grandchildren (a 16th was still to come). Late one night, we all found ourselves congregated on the porch of one of the cottages we’d rented. My uncle Billy, a singer-songwriter with a beautiful Irish tenor voice, was leading us all in song. The woods around us were alive with the sound of crickets and summer. The air was warm and welcoming, like it was inviting us to stay outside as late as we liked. Somewhere above, through the branches, I could see the stars and the moonlight peeking through. Even as a 14-year-old boy, I felt the magic of that moment – of an entire family spending some cherished time with one another, locked in together on the same exact wavelength. But I always wondered what that moment felt like for my grandparents, who were sitting there in the seats of honor, watching us all revel in each other’s company. What must it have been like for the two of them to look around and see everything they’d built together surrounding them in that way?

When my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2001, Uncle Billy wrote a song for them that, if it existed in any recorded form, probably would have demanded a slot on this list. For the anniversary celebration, we all learned the song and sang it to grandma and grandpa together. One part, near the end, was set aside for us grandchildren: “And the children of your children/Now are singing back to you/To say your love is spiritual/A miracle come true.” The next part, in the subsequent verse, was always my favorite part, though: “And sometimes in the evening/With pictures on your lap/You’ll remember and you’ll wonder/Did we really do all that?”

I remember thinking of those lines that night on our vacation cottage porch. Heck, we probably sang that song that night, as we did at least once every family reunion. When my grandpa died, after the funeral and the wake, we sang it again, and I wept.

Even in moments like that, of tears and sadness and pain, I always loved the fact that music was such a big part of my extended family and our get-togethers. Billy would always bring his guitar, and we’d always sing, and it would always be magical. (I suppose it’s no surprise that Billy’s son ended up becoming a majorly successful pop songwriter; surely, given our traditions, our family had to produce at least one.) It’s also no surprise to me that, after my grandpa passed away, the only way I could think to cope with what I was feeling was to express it through music. In the week between his death and his funeral, my wife and I made an album of in memoriam songs for him, which we passed out to family members, on CD, at his celebration of life. The first song on that collection was one I’d written for him, called “Carry It Forth,” which I performed at his wake. The rest were covers, mostly songs of mourning like Jimmy Eat World’s “Hear You Me,” Springsteen’s “My City of Ruins,” and Averi’s “Goodnight, Goodbye.”

“Passing Afternoon” was the last song we recorded for that project, and I felt like that was fitting. If you were to categorize songs into different stages of grief, “Passing Afternoon” would be acceptance. It’s a song that recognizes, completely, how brief and impermanent life is, just like the afternoon on a perfect summer day. Eventually, the sun will sink toward the horizon, and the shadows will go long, and the evening chill will find its way into the air, and the nighttime will come. “There are things we can’t recall/Blind as night that finds us all,” as Beam sings in the fourth verse. I still remember recording that song, in a single take, and feeling this serene calm wash over me as I sang the words – like my grandpa was sending a message to let me know that it was okay to accept that his life had drawn to a close.

I found my way back to “Passing Afternoon” six years later as I drove the 400 miles home from visiting my grandma for the last time. It had been a brief trip – an impromptu mid-week drive from northern Michigan to northern Ohio in late September 2020. I hadn’t seen my grandma since the previous November, at my older brother’s wedding. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic had cancelled any and all family gatherings, and had also significantly restricted visitors to her senior living community. Amidst the loneliness and listlessness of that time, my grandma’s health and vitality faded, and by the fall, she was in hospice care. When my mom told me she only had a few days left, I dropped everything and got in the car. She was only fleetingly conscious while I was there, but sitting by her bedside was extremely meaningful nonetheless, and gave me a chance to say goodbye, and to tell her I loved her one last time.

The drive home was my grieving process. I cycled through a lot of sad songs that day, any number of which could have been featured as part of this series. But “Passing Afternoon” felt like the most meaningful one. I’d made a playlist of melancholy songs for the occasion, some of which dealt with death directly, some of which just felt appropriate for the weight of a goodbye, or for the potency of a celebration of life. “Passing Afternoon” came up on the playlist relatively late in the drive, as the afternoon faded to evening and after I’d cried all the tears I had in me for the day. It had been a cloudy, often rainy drive, but I remember vividly the sun breaking through the clouds as Sam Beam sang me to peace: “There are sailing ships that pass/All our bodies in the grass/Springtime calls her children ’til she lets them go at last.” I knew my grandma was ready to depart this world, and I wondered if that break in the clouds was the moment where she ascended to heaven. I remember half expecting my phone to start ringing – my mom calling to let me know that grandma had passed. In reality, my grandma had a few more days, but I always look back on that moment, and on this song, as when I let her go.

If pressed about my funeral song, I’d probably still tell you to play “The Trapeze Swinger” at my wake. That song still feels like the most perfect post-script to a life – the final wave goodbye before you leave the world behind. But that’s the impressive thing about Sam Beam and his songwriting, because “Passing Afternoon,” I think, is a perfect song about death in an equally profound way. If “The Trapeze Swinger” is the song for the leaver, “Passing Afternoon” is the song for the left behind – those of us still down here, missing the people who are gone, working to make them proud, and trying to cherish all the beauty of our endless numbered days.

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