“I’m sure you know why I’m calling you,” Ann said.

I did. She stayed on the phone with me for an hour while she recounted his final hours. I was grateful for the time, knowing she had a list of others to call and another list of arrangements to make. Because while he was my fill-in Dad, he was her husband.

Tom was gone.

After a fight with bone cancer, he’d made it. He was in the clear. And then, in some sort of messed up technicality, an infection took hold of his depleted immune system– an infection that I could have right now, at this minute, and not even know it because my body would just wipe it clean away– and it killed him. The stone that took down Goliath.

I stayed quiet when I hung up. My Someone tried to comfort me, but I wasn’t quite ready. I was already fast forwarding to healing. I made a mental list– more yoga, more writing, long walks, lots of kale. I stood up, grabbed the keys, and drove to the grocery store. I chose a small basket of organic vegetables. I bought dog food. When I returned, my Someone had cleaned the camper. We hitched up and we drove out of Fort Collins, heading toward the wide skies of Wyoming, silent all the way.

While the sun set, I imagined Tom riding the mountains on his Harley– up and over and beyond, just out of my sight line. I’d think of it just long enough to catch the rock in my throat, then I would breathe deep, letting it dissipate, letting the tears well up, and then… nothing. There was no riptide of grief to carry me away.

I self congratulated on my ability to self heal, to prepare myself adequately in order to simultaneously deal with grief before the event itself even happened, and carry on with my work, and be cognizant enough to know that I was, in fact, grieving.

Of course, I’m an idiot. I didn’t account for the Yips.

In May, I’d received a similar call. Tom was on a downswing. I was prepared. We were on our way home from a 2 1/2 month disaster tour– broken transmission, bronchitis, the works. We had three weeks to sleep and release an album and host some company and secure our house before we were gone again for another 2 1/2 months. And in this, Tom wavered on the edge of the wall that separates the living from the dead. I kept myself alert. We left our home on June 2nd heading west, prepared to turn our rig around at any moment and head to Ohio.

The second tour was a bit smoother, and we relished in the beginning of summer newness– the long light, the cool nights. But then, there was an unmistakable strangeness. While the tires held and our bodies felt strong and easy, each time on stage was wiggly. I held my instruments as I carefully and unsteadily hold newborns. The lyrics evaded me until the last second. I dropped chords and words, small at first, then swapping entire verses. I couldn’t remember how to do what I’ve been doing for the last twelve years. It wasn’t stage fright, exactly. I could easily stand in front of audiences, talking between songs, moving about it like an office worker in a boring cubicle. But the playing was strange.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” I told my Someone.

“Maybe it’s just stress?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “It’s like I don’t even like this anymore.”

This worried him. For all of my love of music, it has never been my one-and-only. I find within me a current of creativity. Dam the river one way and it’ll come out another. I’ve had to overcome years of intense, debilitating stage fright to do what we do now. It required countless nights of talking me onto the stage again, of shaking uncontrollably, of near tears until I burst into song, the nerves subsiding only near the end of the set list. He didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t move forward.

“I’ll figure it out,” I promised. I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to do what I do again. But without the pointed weirdness of being. It was the only way I could explain it when I called Bryan. It was now the second week of tour, and the feeling persisted.

“Oh, you have the yips!” he said.

I have a lot of interests, but sports are not any of them. Bryan kindly explained the sensation I was feeling back to me, but in terms of a pitcher holding the ball.

“He’s a very good pitcher, too, but this thing he does all of the time, this thing he and everyone knows he’s good at, it’s suddenly strange and foreign to him. Like, he can’t figure out how the ball used to feel in his hands.”

I had the yips. I was so relieved. What an easy thing, to name something, and then for it to go away.

They didn’t go away. But now, at the end of a show, when my Someone would ask, “How was that one?” I could say, “I still had the yips, but it was easier.”

Except it wasn’t easier. It was getting harder.

We were writing more. I made little books mid week to pass the time and fill the merch table. We took walks across the Midwest and into the West and the yips followed me. I was neither homesick nor happy. I relished the summer water any chance my body could fall into it. We evaded the hottest days in a record high temperature summer in the west. We had all the luck. Excepting that the stage each night was a vacuum of reality, and I’d fall into the silence of my previous experience into a chaotic hole of panic until the last notes were sung. I developed a pre-show ritual. I meditated. I did more yoga. I practiced more than we ever had on tour.

And then, in Fort Collins, CO I got a call from my dear friend.

“I’m sure you know why I’m calling you,” Ann said.

The yips were gone, at least for Wyoming, Utah, and then Wisconsin on the homeward trek. We’d watched the funeral from a board room in a public library in Wyoming. Ann insisted we stay on the course of our tour, that she’d wait for the burial service til we were passing through on our way home. It was an unbelievably charitable gift of closure, as she waited wide open in her grief for our arrival.

I wrote her a song, one for the love of she and Tom, for the stories too good to lay to rest. But while the yips had relented, the deep cavern of nothingness took its place.

“I am in grief,” I told my Someone and myself. But still I couldn’t feel it. Instead, I took a week’s worth of hot yoga classes.

“I am in grief,” I practiced again, and had no recollection of the performance I gave, whether it was good or bad. Instead, I took two long walks with my dogs. I tried to find the button inside that lets the mounting pressure of grief at last release, like a sprinkler system to a fire alarm. But the alarm within me kept ringing, and still no release. I couldn’t find it. I concluded instead that I must be beyond it. I must have yoga-ed and walked and written my way above it.

The yips returned.

We played our final show in Wisconsin, and I became furious and exhausted with myself. We stepped on to the stage. We played a couple of songs. Then, I asked the audience if we might play them a new one. I told them about Tom. I stopped performing. I stopped trying to put on a good show. I stepped into myself. I played them the song.

Now I was getting somewhere.

When we got to Ohio the next day, I was dreading it and couldn’t wait to get there– all at once. I stopped telling myself I was in grief. I’d decided that function was broken. I’d done enough. I was in the clear. The alarm kept ringing in my head.

I sat next to Tom’s ashes the next day as we drove to Pennsylvania. There, over the water of the reservoir I’d driven countless times in my college years on my way between my family and my chosen family, the alarm reached its height, and at last the release came.

The graveside service was short, on a sunny, pretty morning. The heavy marble that held my person, my guy, my damn-I’m-proud-of-you-kid voice that stood on top of all of the other voices– including my own– for the last two decades: he was put into the ground.

I did not tell myself I was in grief. I did not calculate the methods in which I would heal. I simply watched as someone who was always there was no longer there. I placed dirt on top of him and turned away. I lingered. I looked back. I let the electricity of impending grief make way for the soft, painful suffocating pillow of it. I cried and fell into a hole within me that had been freshly dug, too. Because grief is not the putting out of a fire. It is a vacancy forever unfilled. One must become adept at working around it for the rest of one’s life. But first, one must lie in it.

In August, it seems, I bury my people.

I am in grief, now, though I don’t much tell myself that. I don’t need to. I am no longer justifying extra yoga practices or the solitary time I spend journaling. I am no longer approaching my grief as a measure of self improvement, a progress report on my emotional evolution.

The yips have more or less subsided. It makes sense, now, that the core of my ability to connect with others would be inextricably tied to my ability to be honest with myself. Of course I had the yips. I didn’t know who I was without Tom. The only thing that ever worked for me as a performer getting over my stage fright was to be myself. Myself lying in a hole of grief within me was not a vulnerability I was willing to share, so I held my breath against the impending change. I was holding my breath for Tom. Now, with his last exhale, I exhaled, too. And while not all at once, I am working around the new vacancy. I am learning myself again, who I am with this new emptiness. And I am coming back, this altered version of myself, and learning to share it again.

How?

I am singing.