Wildflower, Part II

As we round into fall, I must say it has been quite a year in my world - a seminal one, in many ways. As an artist, I must admit that my professional activities have always affected my personal realm, and it would be impossible for me to say that my private life has not affected my work. I find inspiration or direction in every corner of my experiences, and the events of the past year have both rocked me and pointed the way.

2023 began with a peculiar feeling I couldn’t quite identify. Holiday travel had been rough and I began the year exhausted. Professional projects had piled up, my dad’s health was not good, and I felt an inertia that was very unusual for me. As always, I loved my teaching, my recording projects, and my performing activities, but I felt off - as if I was harboring a premonition that everything was about to change.

With the arrival of spring, I went about my routine – teaching, performing, overseeing my dad’s care, running my foundation, and planning the summer session of my harp institute. I took great joy in organizing my spring release of Arturo Sandoval’s Wildflower, written for me as part of my FIVE MINUTES for Earth project, and I had decided that it would be tribute to my mom, who died of Alzheimer’s in 2012. We chose May 12, Mother’s Day weekend, for the release. The piece spoke to me with a great emotional subtext that touched me deeply and reminded me of my mom’s spirit.

On May 11, I was feeling celebratory: I had just wrapped my teaching semester and I had dinner with a dear friend. Wildflower was dropping the next day, and I looked forward to the interviews that were scheduled to promote the release. I exhaled for a minute.

Later that night at around 1:00 a.m., my dad called me on his way to the hospital. He was having some breathing problems and his nursing staff didn’t want to take any chances. It sounded a bit ominous, so I booked the first flight out the next morning. When I landed in Oklahoma on the morning of May 12 and turned my phone on, I got the message that my dad was gone.

My relationship with my dad was not ordinary. We were about as close as a father and a daughter could be. We tackled whatever came our way, we philosophized, we laughed, we supported each other, and we found solutions. We did that all the way to the end. I have no idea how long I must have sat in the hospital parking lot that day in Oklahoma after saying my very unsatisfactory goodbye. I was inconsolable. The sky was dark, and rain was pounding on my windshield in a way that reminded me of tornado storms when I was a kid. At least everything matches, I thought to myself. I was in the denial stage. I couldn’t quite grasp that he was gone. Exhausted, I closed my eyes and wondered if this was all some crazy dream, triggered by a simple rainstorm outside my bedroom window.

Once I snapped out of denial, I felt weak and sad and zombie-like. I threw myself into giving my dad the most beautiful day of services that I could create, contacting his legions of friends and adoring former students, scouring hundreds of photos for the perfect video tribute, sorting through his life in files and mementos, tackling the mountains of final paperwork, choosing a headstone, a coffin, and a plot, packing up his world, and then loading it all into my rented Grand Cherokee for the long, solitary drive home to Cleveland.

The summer was largely consumed with details that accompany the end of a life. It was also a time of reflection, the celebration of my daughter’s 21st birthday, and the 30th anniversary of my marriage. The truth of it is that these big events are all functions of age – rewards, if you like, of having lived a while. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to grieve and celebrate the life of a beloved parent, to launch my child into official adulthood, and to mark the three-decade milestone of a lifelong partnership.

The loss of my dad has given me a profoundly new perspective on the impermanence of life. Every minute, every hour, and every day matter, and we must always appreciate the gift of our own lives and the lives around us. My dad and I said “I love you” almost daily. Even so, I just wish I could have said it one more time.

As I recount all this in written words, I am able to channel my dad’s philosophical perspective and view the past year of seismic waves from a higher vantage point. As the saying goes, grief is the price of love, and I am finally able to feel more lifted by my dad’s spirit than weighted by the loss. Time is a miraculous thing.

Today, five months later, I choose to honor both of my parents with music. Having not done full justice to Wildflower’s release in May, I want to share it again today, as a tribute not just to my mom, but to my dad as well. While they divorced in 1984 after 25 years of marriage, they both lived their lives with passion - together and separately, building a life and a family, navigating complicated waters, and doing their best.

Arturo Sandoval’s Wildflower is a poignant, sentimental, and beautifully complex work that struck me as a fitting soundtrack to my mother’s life - and now, it speaks to me again as an appropriate postlude to my dad’s passing as well.

Music can often say a thousand words, and at least for me, Wildflower will always carry a deep subtext that could fill a book. But after a point, enough words have been said. There comes a time when all we need is the stillness of peace, the memory of love, and the healing of music.

-YK