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Tim on La Petite Mort
24th February 2014 | Tim
Lyrically most of these songs are infused with death. The death of my Mother and a friend who I adored. My Mother passed at 90 in my arms and it was so clearly a birth of some sort, that it left me in a state of rapture for quite some time; that may have some bearing on why this work is uplifting not mournful. Being present at a birth, for an infants first breath, and at death, for a parents last one, seemed to me to be the same thing. I thought, my God, if this is dying that’s great, Ive got that sussed.
Six months later one of the people who I loved the most in the world passed. She was 70 years young and had kept the remission of her cancer from me and other friends. She had introduced me and my wife to each other eighteen years ago and married us ten years later. Since then we kept trying to meet up, but there was no rush, we had all the time in the world.
We worked out she was dying from information which came to us in our dreams and we flew to New York to say goodbye. On arrival at the airport we received word it was too late to see her.
This inability to say goodbye, to tell her I loved her, has haunted me ever since. It turns out I haven’t got this death thing sussed after all.
Life lifts up her skirt and gives us a flash of her mysteries, it is a shocking and uplifting moment. This record is my attempt to make some sense of it.