Widow's Voice

ABBA Revival

| Posted by:

4 September 2021

Image by Andrew Ebrahim on Unsplash

When I landed back at Geneva airport this week, after a few days of business travel in Sweden (my first business travel in over 18 months), I headed over to the luggage collection belts. While waiting for my luggage to come through, I skimmed the BBC news website for a while, and came across the news of the ABBA reunion.

I scrolled through the text, fully identifying with the writer’s own “special relationship” with the group over the decades, and clicked on the video of their one of their new songs, “I Still Have Faith In You”.

And I was in tears. Torrents of hot, silent tears, streaming down my face, some of them getting caught in the fabric of my face mask, some of them getting through even that. Nose dripping in there too for good measure. Glasses steaming up. (Many a time have I blessed face masks for concealing crying in public. This was one of those times).

I’ve listened to the song, with or without the video, a few times since then, and each time it’s the same. Hot tears flood down my face. So much can be caught up in a song.  So much emotion, so much grief, whether in the lyrics or in the lines of music.

The lyrics of the song are about the questioning of whether or not the magic of the band is still there. But what I hear is simply a love song. An ode to a loving, long-lasting relationship. Whether the loved one is still alive. Or not.

“There was a union//Of heart and mind//The likes of which are rare and oh-so hard to find//The joy and the sorrow//We have a story//And it survived”

I also hear an anthem to Grieflings, a call for the courage, strength and resilience required to just keep on carrying on. When we wonder if we might be able to. “Do I have it in me?” (though I realise that that question is for another context).

“And we need one another//Like fighters in a ring//We’re in this together//Passion and courage//Is everything”

And of course, my crying was about Mike. And Julia. Neither of whom are here to share the song with. In our family, you couldn’t help but be exposed to Abba. I’d play up-beat songs for cooking and dancing. I behave like a carefree teenager when Dancing Queen or Does Your Mother Know come on.

Other ABBA songs, or parts of songs, have taken on greater significance over the years. Another two that make me weep are “The Winner Takes It All” (yes – I know it’s about the end of a relationship, but what is death, if not the end of a relationship?). And most poignantly, even while all three kids were alive, “Slipping Through My Fingers”, caused anticipatory grief in me. It’s so so so hard.

Empty Nesting can be hard enough for people.

Widowing Empty Nests is just unfathomably hard.

 

The Songs
I Still Have Faith In You

https://open.spotify.com/track/3ddxe0WYUpNPtSnHgQOad5?si=031a9c7bfa1c49e1

The Winner Takes It All

https://open.spotify.com/track/3oEkrIfXfSh9zGnE7eBzSV?si=dbce8124d3a54410

Slipping Through My Fingers

https://open.spotify.com/track/4OkSYRRFb3UMXtTj1SnBOR?si=f89cd6c973744acd

 

 

 

 

 

About Emma Pearson

My life is a whirling mix of swishy strands, dark and glowing brightly, rough and silky smooth – all attempting to be seen, felt and integrated at once. Here are some of my themes.

I am British and now recently also French (because of Brexit), and I have lived in France for the past 21 years. I am 55 and sometimes feel to be an “older widow”, and yet I feel so young. I lost my best male friend Don to bowel cancer in September 2015, my brother Edward to glioblastoma in January 2016, my husband Mike to pancreatic cancer in April 2017, and my sweet youngest child, Julia, to grief-related suicide, in July 2019. And I met a new love (let’s call him Medjool, after my favourite kind of date), off one single meeting on a dating website. Our relationship has exploded into blossom as of June 2019.

I am widowed and I am in a new relationship. I have lost a best friend, a sweet brother, a beloved husband and a precious child, and I still have both parents who are alive and well. I live my days with my grief wrapped in love and my love wrapped in grief. I no longer even try to make sense of anything. I just hope to keep on loving and living for as long as I can, while grieving the losses of loves that are no longer breathing by my side.

I suspect my writing here will be a complex mish-mash of love and sorrow. I also write on http://www.widowingemptynests.com/.

TO LEAVE A COMMENT ON A BLOG, sign in to the comments section using your Facebook or Gmail accounts, or sign up for Disqus.