Killing Me Softly
By Stuti Sharma
The song ”Killing Me Softly” is the tenderest way my mother revealed her sadness to me through art. There is this book from home, this yellow-paged book from the 70s that had musical arrangements of the “greatest hits.” I think I took it before I left. When you live at the home you grew up in, everything is a reminder of your parents in a way that can be suffocating. But when you move, especially without approval, you try to gather everything of yours safely and in relative secrecy. You leave behind pieces of you, like photo albums from birth, or pots and pans you would routinely use to make memories you didn’t know you were making. You manage to only take things you think won’t be noticed. The resulting one or two items from your parents then become the things you reach for to recall them, and it’s insufficient: what’s one cassette when there’s a whole house I’m too afraid to scavenge for pieces?
The memory of a silver serving dish once dominated my thoughts, it had been so prominently displayed in our lives, in an understated way, at the dining table. This memory was triggered when a few friends and I were watching the Suspiria from the 70’s, and there was a silver serving dish in the movie similar to the one at home. Also it being a horror movie about family structures and secrets, I guess it’s natural my mind went to my childhood home. Ma received the dish when she married—a glass dish seated in a tray of silver with legs, covered with an elaborate silver cover too. Ma and pa regarded it as finery, as a symbol of good things. It would have biriyani, chicken curry, saag and paneer, and sometimes swimming rasmalai when we had guests over.
I go to food to trace back my heritage and my connection to my parents. Because I grew up homeschooled and in a very tight-knit family, a large chunk of my work as an adult has been dedicated to thinking and writing about my parents. Sometimes it’s hard and I have to get high, sit in silence, and process which parts of my past are for giving to others, and which are for keeping to myself. I realized, in my year away from the home I left and have not returned to in peace, that I now search for my parents in music. So many physical artifacts that are reminders of who they are, of a place where I belonged, of who I come from, are no longer available.
The piano songbook of the greatest hits has a simple piano arrangement of “Killing Me Softly.” I discovered the song when Pa brought home About A Boy and we all watched it together. I might have been too young for it, but I remember my mom started singing and talking to me about “Killing Me Softly” days after watching the film. I’ve tried to find which cover my parents listened to in the 70s in India and Kenya, and the closest is this one by Roberta Flack.
I saw the lyrics as an eight year old, but I didn’t understand their meaning. The narrator sings about a younger man, probably someone with, on the surface, less life experience than her yet shared some mutual pain. She heard he was good at music, so she went to see him, to listen to music. Instead of a fun night out, she was invited to sit in her pain. I hadn’t lived enough to know how that felt in person yet. But something about it stayed with me, and I would practice the cover on piano regularly. I was always careful about when I played it around my mom. I didn’t want the tune to take her somewhere she wasn’t looking to go.
“Divorced people listen to this song a lot,” she said once. “It talks about the type of pain they’ve been through.” I wonder why she went to divorce. This had to have been after a lot of ugly shit shook my family’s stability, and my perception of love, and the way I wanted to be loved too. She saw her own pain surface. When I listen to the song I think of the grief that I’ve had in being left and leaving those I loved, of betrayal, of ways I have loved wrongly and ways I have been wrongly loved—and in those things, I also see the beauty and pain in what it means to try to love right, and for someone to try to love you how they know is right. My mom was pretty expressive about how she felt most of the time on the surface, but rarely so deeply and so directly an emotional response to art. This strikes me as such a vulnerable part of our family that we often don’t consider: the way art touches us has also touched and still touches them. The song helped her and helps me find and identify the pain we have been through, are going through, and anticipate going through. What guides us out of the maze is that we are not alone sitting in our grief. “Killing Me Softly” is about being seen, about someone bearing witness to you, and how it undoes you and heals you at the same time.
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A tarot card I pulled a lot in the past couple months is the Death card. I also have a lot of 12th house placements, which basically signifies that peace is found through learning to let things go, to die and be reborn, to be in the place between death and life, and to surrender - softly - to death. I want something new so much, like all of us. We’ve been through this year shrouded with death, and it is going to carry on for so many reasons, eventually touching all of us.
The poet Dunya Mikhail writes in her poem, Tablets IV:
“The dead don’t come back
but they appear every time
in the greenness of the grass.”
The day my sister’s cat Sugar died, I remember seeing her motionless body that was once vibrant and breathing, in disbelief. I was twenty-one, and she had been with me since I was eleven. I remembered seeing her sleeping that morning. She had seemed a little sick, and I felt this instinct to stop to say goodbye. I have this fear that when I am around something I love, it’s always going to be the last time. So I have learned to follow my instincts, to give my all to every moment as much as I can instead of shrinking back. I took some extra time and petted her softly until she purred. At work, I got a slew of texts from my sister confirming that Sugar had passed later that morning. Getting home that day was foggy. We got through it in a rote way—buried her body, planted a tree with sweet flowers. I don’t remember the details of the day, but I remember it being softer. The grass, like the poem said, was greener. The wind blew gently through it. There was a sweetness to the sunshine that made my sister and I cry on the way to Home Depot. It felt like Sugar returned, and I still feel like I see her in the wind moving through treetops and through new spring grass.
My cousin, N’s, death is one that I am constantly processing. He died when he was 24, exactly my age right now. Because of immigration, my family was not even able to go and pay our respects. I’m a very spiritual person, and his death has become a gateway for me: this year has brought me a lot of messages that confirm he’s one of my guides and lights. I am undiluted in my faith because it sits in balance with my doubt. I come from a family with a long history of volatile relationships, so connecting to ancestors makes me wary because I don’t know who I can trust to call on. But he was one of the most important people in my life as a kid so I felt like it was safe to honor him especially because he would always say “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” I bought a death altar last year with his birthstone, Emerald, to honor and connect with him.
Recently I was crying in my car to a song that reminded me of my mom. I begged that, if anything, I begged not to be alone. I needed to be held, I needed to be reminded there would be something like home or someone’s arms outside of the hollow place I found myself in, weeping. And then I felt an energy behind me. I let myself collapse like I never do. I believe it was my cousin there in the car with me, letting me know that he was here sharing my pain. The next day, I sat on my porch stoned in the sun again sitting with whatever feelings came up. Trust is hard for me, and trusting that people are not going to hurt me intentionally, cruelly, is a daily struggle. As I sat in the sun on the first 50 degree Chicago day, I felt a message—it felt like my cousin speaking: what if you tried to believe you were truly cared for? Just give it a shot. That instantly eased me. It let me put some of my armor down. In an amazing tarot reading shortly after that from a dear friend and healer, she pulled a couple cards and mentioned ancestors/connecting to my family would be coming up. And the cards she pulled all had the word “cousin.”
I can’t spin death in a positive way, or encourage you that one day you’ll see them in the afterlife. I won’t pretend that one day the dream you let die will come back, or that the dead relationship will find life again. We are irreversibly changed by death, no matter what type of death it is, and processing death requires that a part of us also dies.
Before a plant dies, it finds a way to disperse its seeds. The task now is to collect those seeds, to learn what it means to grow again. I’ve lost a lot—lots of metaphorical and literal death has surrounded me too, beloveds. I’ve seen a man die from being shot by the police in front of me, I have lost many loved ones, I have witnessed so many deaths while holding my grieving loved ones—I dream of death. And it never gets any easier. My homie and I took a road trip recently, and both recoiled at every instance of roadkill. “It’s like I have to process it every time,” I explained. “That’s EXACTLY the feeling!” he said.
The death of leaving my childhood home, of leaving people who I thought I couldn’t live without, the death of who I used to be before all the loss and grief—these deaths have had me drowning in grief. Regrettably, gratefully, life continues without the dead. We can not go in reverse but we can learn to transform all the pain and lessons that death brings and be reborn. We can turn it into a life that is vivid, that is kinder, in which we can heal ourselves and others. The dead come back in some ways. I have experienced this by surrendering to it. After every death of myself and in my life, I have witnessed rebirth. It hurts exactly like the death did. It pulls you to grow when you’d rather be cocooned inside of a seed.
And so because death is out of my control and inevitable, because being undone and seen is the way to soften and find new life, because I can only continue with help, I ask of the divine: I don’t want to be roadkill, but please, kill me softly.