Jimmy Buffett

 I have pretty much ignored my blog all year.  It wasn’t necessarily intentional. I started graduate school this year and I love it.  For the first time, maybe ever, I feel like I’m vocationally in the perfect place.  I’m going to be a licensed mental health counselor and I think I’m going to be great at it.  (As a side note, high school me coasted along academically and really couldn’t have cared less about any of it.  Graduate school me is a straight A student, despite having a full time job and family responsibilities.  High school me keeps asking what the hell is happening right now...LOL)

Anyhow, that’s all probably a post for a different time. Regardless, I’ve found that I missed this blog and I’ve committed to writing 10 minutes a day on personal, non school related projects, so a relaunch of the blog dovetails nicely with that goal.

  Today, I want to write about Jimmy Buffett.  Celebrity deaths don’t usually phase me.  I’m sad of course, that someone died, especially if it was sudden or unexpected. I feel empathy for families. But frankly, I’ve always found it hard to be really distressed over a loss of someone I didn’t personally know.  But Jimmy’s loss hits different for me.  This one hurt.  

I first saw Jimmy in the early 90’s. It was even before Jeff and I were married.  My friend Laura asked if we wanted to go with her and her boyfriend at the time.  I said of course before I even talked to Jeff about it.  He loved live music.  I didn’t figure it would be a problem.  It was actually.  

“Jimmy Buffett?” Jeff asked dubiously, “Isn’t he country?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.  “I think he’s one of those artists they don’t really know what to do with, like Johnny Cash.  They just lump him into a certain genre because everybody has to be in a genre.”  

This in itself was a long-standing argument.  I love music.  I don’t find the need for genres.  I like Mitch Miller, Steve Miller, Roger Miller and Glen Miller. I once put the love theme from the movie Ice Castles right after “Big Balls” by AC DC on a mixtape. Jeff always felt that genres were important so you could find the music you liked.  But I like almost all of it, so I find them limiting.    

I didn’t know a lot of Jimmy’s music myself at that point other than Margaritaville and Volcano, but I assured Jeff that a Jimmy Buffett concert would be a good time and we went.  Me enthusiastically, because I love a new experience and him grudgingly because he didn’t.  It was indeed a good time.  We all loved it, even Jeff.  Especially Jeff.  He became the biggest Jimmy Buffett fan ever.  I have fond memories of summer parties at our house, Jeff with a Corona in his hand, manning the grill in a Hawaiian shirt with Jimmy’s music playing loudly.  

We used to have music dates.  We’d sit in the living room and play music for one another for hours.  Jimmy was often part of those dates too.

Our daughter was born in 2008 with severe congenital heart defects.  While I worked on getting myself from the hospital she was born in, to the hospital she would die in, Jeff stayed with her in the cardiac ICU.  And sang Jimmy Buffett songs to her.

I don’t know about other people, but for me, loss always gets tangled up with other loss. I’ve loved Jimmy’s music for a long time and now he’s gone.  But the context in which I listened to that music is gone now too.  Jeff won’t ever help me host another summer party.  His grilling days are over.  His listening to music days are over too.  His hearing is still fine.  He can still hear 70 Golden oldies or whatever music they’re playing in the activity room at the nursing home, trying to get residents to engage.  But he is beyond choosing music and understanding why particular songs were important to him.  

Jimmy Buffett’s death has nothing to do with Jeff’s dementia.  But for me, the two are entwined and always will be.  It makes both losses sharper somehow.  I’ll keep listening to Jimmy Buffett forever.  There will be new contexts. Different parties. New love.  Life goes on because that’s what life does.  But this celebrity passing hurt my heart.  RIP Jimmy Buffett.