On the passing of a friend and “Everyone Says Hi”

It will be a while before I process the passing of my dear friend, Letizia Tagliafierro. I write this post on the day of her funeral. The wake and funeral were among the hardest things I have ever experienced. I have been crying for the last three days.

Because I listen to so much Bowie music and have for so long, I often find that some of his songs help guide my thinking about things that are hard to otherwise comprehend. I think that’s one of the uses of art in general, and of all art it is Bowie music that I contemplate most. When Bowie died, part of my song-a-day tribute was a week-long sequence of songs Bowie wrote or performed about death. “Everyone Says Hi” was the culmination of that sequence.

This is Bowie’s most optimistic song about death. As with many of his songs, it can be interpreted in multiple ways. You can hear it as not being about death at all but simply about someone moving away, or the elasticity of relationships. But I have always thought of this as being about death. I think it expresses the thinking of someone experiencing loss. The narrator doesn’t get a response in the song. His admonition that, “you can always come home,” is more a hope than a statement of fact. The narrator is not sad but there is an underlying melancholy to what on its face seems like a happy song.

My friend just died. I feel like we didn’t get enough of her. I feel like talking with her right now. Her own wake seemed like an event at which we would meet up with her. Actually, the last time I was at that funeral home was for her father’s wake, and that’s what we did— we met up with her. Not this time.

Still, there’s this intense desire to say more, even if the more is just a greeting, just an expression of love. Just an admonition that she can always come home. Everyone says hi.