The Graveyard Near The House…And My Heart

The Grave Yard Near The House – The Airborne Toxic Event

I have probably listened to this song literally over 1,000 times, probably closer to 10,000 but I did not want to do the math to see if that is closer.  But it sounds good.  I listened to it on repeat for months and months.  The song is just one that I seemed to take a lot out of during some of my roughest times.  The worse it got the more and more I would listen to it.  I have written the lyrics below and then I added in my thoughts on each set.  Although I will say that my thoughts on this song would change as I moved from problem to problem. It seemed like a new piece of it would speak to me each time I encountered another problem.

The other day when we were walking by the graveyard near the house you asked me if I thought we would ever die.

And if life and love both fade so predictably, we’ve made ourselves a kind of predictable lie.
So I pictured us like corpses lying side by side in pieces in some dark and lonely plot under a bough.

We looked so silly there all decomposed, half turned to dust in tattered clothes, though we probably look just as silly now.

 For me, I thought this means that we all create our own life(reality) in our own heads.  We create our own reality based on what we want and how we want to live.  We seem to live most of our lives pretending that life will go on forever and really in the end we all just end up being dust in the wind.

Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, all this dog-eared innocence.

I can’t pretend that I can tell you what is going to happen next or how to be.

But you have no idea about me.

Do you?

 As we grow and go through the pains of learning about the world and the reality of everything, we lose what innocence we have that kept us living like we will live forever.  We never know what will happen, when we die or someone we love dies.  We also figure out that we may not really even know each other.

And it left me to wonder if people ever know each other or just stumble around like strangers in the dark.

‘Cause sometimes you seem so strange to me, I must seem strange to you.

Like two actors playing our parts. Did you memorize your lines? ‘Cause I did. Here’s the part where I get so mad. I tell you that I can’t forget the past.

You get so quiet now and you seem somehow like a lost and lonely child and you just hope that the moment won’t last.

 As we live side by side in this life we really are going through it blindly.  There is not anyone who has experienced the things we have exactly as we have and so no one will ever really know who I am.  I will always be a stranger to others and they will be to me as well.  Instead, we act like the people we are supposed to be.  I am the husband and father playing the roles that come with those titles and my wife plays her roles as wife and mother as well.  We both carry on doing the things that are expected of those roles when in reality we both have baggage that affects each of us and how we interact with each other.  Some of it makes us love each other more, some so angry we believe we can never forgive that person again.  It isn’t until you realize that you never know who you are and until you are confronted with yourself that you see how truly innocent and alone you really are.

Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye all this dogged innocence.

I can’t pretend that I can tell you what is going to happen next or how to be.
But you have no idea about me.

You have no idea about me. Do you?

 No one really knows who I am including myself.  I can feel all the innocence of my youth and ignorance melting away and revealing the truth behind life and how little I actually know.  Do I know what I am going to do next?  Not anymore than I know who I really am.

So, there’s always a way around. There’s something tying our feet to the ground.
A moment passed, we hear how it sounds.

And it seems a little less profound, like we’re all going the same way down.

Yea, we’re all going the same way down.

 I still seem to be able to go through life momentarily forgetting about the guarantee of death but as that realization occurs the profoundness of everything I am working for and trying to be is not near as important as I once thought.

I’m just trying to write it all down.

‘Cause I write songs, and you write letters. We are tied like two in tethers, and we talk and read and laugh and sleep at night in bed together. And you wake in tears sometimes, I can see the thoughts flash across your eyes.
They say, “Darling will you be kind? Will you be a good man and stay behind if I get old?”

Then the letters all flash through my head, with the words that I was told about the fading flesh of life and love, the failures of the bold. I can list each crippling fear like I’m reading from a will.

And I’ll defy every one and love you still. I will carry you with me up every hill. And if you die before I die, I’ll carve your name out of the sky. I’ll fall asleep with your memory and dream of where you lie.

It may be better to move on and to let life just carry on and I may be wrong. Still I’ll try.

This is the where I believe that it does not matter who or what I might be in my eyes or anyone else’s.  What really matters is who I am working on becoming.  My life is going to be full of successes and failures but what matters is not whether I achieve certain things but that I am trying.  Each day I need to get up and try and be the man I want to be.  Then in the end whether I die before my wife or not I will be remembered for the man I always was trying to become.  I may never know who I am but I should know who I want to become and that is what I work towards.  I want my wife to look at me and not compare me to her dad, but just be happy with the man she sees in front of her.  I want her to be proud that she chose to stay even after all my failures.  I want her to see the man I want to be, the man I am working to become, the man I may never be, but I won’t stop trying to become.  In the end we all just have to move on with our lives as we all die someday and still life for others will go on.

‘Cause it’s better to love whether you win or lose or die.

It’s better to love whether you win or lose or die.

It’s better to love and I will love you until I die.

The ending is bitter sweet because in life and love you are guaranteed to fail, but through love and life we learn a little more about ourselves and who we are trying to become.