The Accidental Soundtrack

Grief has a strange way of filing memories. The big moments stay front and center where you expect them. The last conversation. The hospital. The funeral. Those never leave. But the small, ordinary moments get tucked away somewhere you can't access on command. They sit quietly in the back of your mind until something triggers them, and suddenly they're right there in front of you, as vivid as the day they happened.

That's what happened to me recently when I heard, "Lucy! I'm home!"

Robert was half Cuban, and he liked to think of us as Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. This comparison ignored a few key facts, including that I am not a redhead and that our kitchen did not look like a television set. None of that mattered to him. When he came home from work, he would open the door and announce, "Lucy! I'm home!" in the strongest Cuban accent he could muster. It made him laugh; I usually rolled my eyes. That was part of the routine.

I heard it again just recently. David was talking to our cat Lucy after she’d come in from outside. He opened the door for her and said, “Lucy! I’m home!” the way people do when they talk to animals. The phrase carried me straight back. Same kitchen. Same voice. Same way he said it like it was the first time and the hundredth time all at once.

Songs have a way of doing that too. For Christmas, my oldest daughter Kate gave me the gift of writing for StoryWorth. It's a journaling website that sends one prompt a week for a year. At the end, it becomes a hardbound memoir. (Fifty-two weeks of homework - Yay!) I actually enjoy it, though; it gives my memories somewhere to go instead of letting them circle endlessly in my head.

This week's question was simple enough: "Is there a song that brings back a particular memory?"

There are many. Too many, probably.

Robert had a habit of choosing a "song of the day" but it wasn’t just a song that got stuck in his head. He didn't sing it, he recited it. Every morning before work, he'd stand at the kitchen counter putting his lunch together and speak the lyrics out loud like he was holding a conversation. No melody. No dancing. Just words.

More than once, I thought he was talking to me. I'd answer, only to realize I had just responded seriously to a line from a song. It happened often enough that I should have learned to wait before replying, but I never did.

My favorite was one morning when I walked into the kitchen, and he looked at me and said, "Hey, man, you talkin' back to me? Take him out. You gotta keep 'em separated." I froze for a second, trying to figure out how we'd gone from breakfast to confrontation in under five seconds. Then I realized he was reciting lyrics again, this time from Come Out and Play by the Offspring. He grinned, completely pleased with himself, and went back to making his sandwich like nothing unusual had just happened.

I had completely forgotten about that until StoryWorth asked me if songs took me back to special memories. It came rushing back, clear and vivid, like he was standing right there holding a butter knife and a Ziploc bag.

The Offspring lyrics. The "Lucy, I'm home" routine. The grin he gave when he knew he'd confused me. These weren't the moments I thought I'd need to remember. They were just regular mornings; ordinary days. Until they weren't anymore.

Those are the moments you don't prepare for. They ambush you in the middle of the grocery store or while you're driving or sitting at your desk trying to focus on something else entirely. A phrase. A song. A smell. And suddenly you're right back there, standing in a kitchen that doesn't exist anymore, listening to a voice that belongs to the past.

Emmy was only five when he died. She doesn't remember these everyday moments. So when one surfaces like this, I hold onto it. These are the stories I can give her. Not just who her dad was in the big moments, but who he was on a Tuesday morning making lunch.

Songs are particularly powerful that way. They bypass logic entirely. You hear one line, and your brain doesn't give you a choice. You're transported.

For the StoryWorth prompt, I didn't write about the Offspring lyrics or the "Lucy, I'm home" routine; I wrote about the song my sister and I chose for Robert's funeral video. Green Day's Time of Your Life. At the time, it felt right. Reflective. Familiar. Gentle. The kind of song that said something meaningful without saying too much.

We had no idea it was a breakup anthem. We also missed the small but important detail that its subtitle was "Good Riddance." When I discovered that years later, I felt a fresh wave of embarrassment wash over me. Mortified doesn't quite cover it. I remember thinking, of all the songs, how did we miss that? Then I remembered where my head was at the time. Grief makes certain details invisible. You make decisions based on instinct, not research. My sister and I were just trying to survive the week. We picked a song that sounded gentle and perfectly summed up Robert. We got that part right, even if we missed everything else.

Looking back, I can laugh about it now. Of course we picked "Good Riddance" for a funeral… of course we did. Widow brain strikes again.

But the truth is, the song still brings him back. Not because of the lyrics or the subtitle or the meaning we completely missed. It brings him back because it was part of that week. The week we said goodbye. The week we tried to honor him with a slideshow and music and words that didn't feel big enough for what we were losing.

The song is tied to him now, whether we meant it that way or not.

If you're grieving, you already know this. Songs will do this to you. Phrases will do this to you. Random, ordinary moments will crack you wide open without warning. You'll be fine one minute, and then someone will say something or a song will come on, and suddenly you're standing in a memory so vivid it feels like you could reach out and touch it.

You can't prepare for those moments. You can't avoid them. They just happen.

What I've learned over the years is that those small, silly moments matter as much as the big ones. Maybe more. The "Lucy, I'm home" routine. The recited lyrics. The grin over a sandwich. Those are the pieces of him I didn't know I needed to remember until they came back to me years later.

I don't know what will trigger you. I don't know what small detail your brain has been holding onto without telling you. But I can tell you this: when it happens, let it. Don't fight it. Don't apologize for tearing up in the middle of Target because someone said a phrase that sounded too much like something they used to say.

Those moments are gifts, even when they don't feel like it. They remind you that he was real. That he existed in all his ridiculous, ordinary, beautiful ways. That the small things mattered just as much as the big ones.

And sometimes, they remind you that grief brain will absolutely make you pick a breakup song for a funeral video. We're all doing our best.

With Grace for the Mess,

~Stef