Six Years Young
My mother died on the twentieth of September.
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Six Years Young
Her mother died on the twentieth of September. Less than a month later, the one thing in that house that was still warm and still breathing was Toby — six years old, grey around the muzzle, sleeping on the floor of her father's house, the last part of her mother that hadn't gone anywhere.
On an ordinary evening she drove over to pick him up and take him home for a sleepover. She hit him as she was pulling into the driveway. He died within minutes. The post she wrote that night, I accidentally killed my mom's dog tonight and I'm broken, is a single paragraph long and almost impossible to finish.
"Six Years Young" is the slow piano ballad that came out of it. The first verse is bare piano and one voice; strings and light percussion arrive with the first chorus and step back again, so the song opens up only where the pressure does. The chorus is the sentence she must have said to herself a hundred times before she could say anything else:
I was only pulling in.
What the song refuses to do is let the accident close the subject. She knows it was an accident. Knowing does nothing about the bowl by the sink, the leash still hanging on its hook, or the man in that kitchen who in one month has lost his wife and the dog that kept him company.
Play it in the car with the engine still running, in a driveway, at the end of a day you got through by being useful. It is for anyone who has ever carried bad news up a set of porch steps — and for anyone who has learned that the worst thing they will ever do can arrive in the middle of an ordinary kindness.
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