THE CHILD WE LOST 1963 Lyrics
Where the light got thrown by the lamp on the nightstand
On your mother’s side, after midnight, still
You can see it all
You can see it all
And the closet in the corner
On the far back shelf with the keepsakes, she hid
That box there full of letters of regret
By the pictures of the kids
You get faint recollections of your mother’s sigh, countryside drive
And the landscape seen from the window of the backseat with some flowers in a basket
That afternoon after school you and your older sisters
Found your parents in the kitchen at the table
Father lifting off the lid of the box
And a hush fell over everything like a funeral prayer
A reverence, ancestral, heavy in the air
Though you didn’t understand what it meant
That they never said her name aloud around you
Even sitting at the table with her things they’d kept
You recall faintly cards, tiny clothes, and the smell of the paint in the upstairs bedroom
Until then you didn’t know that’s what the box had held
No, they never said her name aloud around you
Only told you it was perfect where your sister went
And you didn’t understand why it hurt them so much then that she’d come and left so soon
Could only guess inside your head at what a “stillbirth” meant
Only knew that mother wept
You watched while father held her, said “Some things come but can’t stay here.”
You saw a brightness. Like a light through your eyes closed tight
Then she tumbled away from here, some place
To remain in the nighttime shadows she made
To be an absence in mom, a sadness hanging over her
Like some Pentecostal flame, drifting on and off
She was “Sister,” only whispered
Sometimes “Her” or
“The Child We Lost.”
You were visions
A vagueness, a faded image
You were visions
You were a flame lit that burned out twice as brightly as the rest of us did
When you left, you were light, then you tumbled away
In the bedroom on the nightstand by your mother’s side
From the light left on there
There’s the box in the closet, all the things kept
And the landscape where she left
Flowers on the grave, marble where they etched that name
And mother cried the whole way home
But she never said it once out loud
On the way back home from where you thought they meant
When they said where sister went
After grandpa got hospice sick and he couldn’t fall asleep
They wheeled his stretcher bed beside her at night
And I saw the light
On the day that he died
By their bed in grandma’s eyes
While us grandkids said our goodbyes
She said “don’t cry”
Somewhere he holds her
Said a name I didn’t recognize
And the light with all the shadows combined
About
Jordan: “[This] song is about Brad [the band’s drummer and Jordan’s cousin] and I’s grandpa and grandma – my mom’s parents and his dad’s parents. It’s from the most part written from the perspective of Brad’s dad, my uncle. My grandma is not doing particularly well. She’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, so it’s been… it’s an interesting thing seeing death in periphery where it’s my grandma, but it really affects the parents and Brad’s parents more. Brad’s dad is a really talented writer and he’s published a book of short stories here. One of the stories is what the song is more or less based on, so I kind of borrowed from his personal experience. Because it’s this thing that all the kids, all the grandkids, have always known about – the stillbirth. My grandma is an incredibly stoic woman – she’s born and raised in farm town Michigan and she has a very antiquated, traditional view of herself and she’s always been that way – she’s very slow to show emotion and very withdrawn and it was the perfect foil to my grandpa, who passed maybe five or six years ago, who was the life of the party and was a very boisterous man who loved to laugh and talk. It’s interesting because we’ve always known about this stillbirth but we’ve known about as much as our parents did, because it was never talked about in the house and they all have these faint recollections of the death and coming back from the hospital. So it was this thing that, to my parents, to my mom, to my uncle, it was this thing that was always present but never discussed until my grandpa passed. I remember going to the house on that day – this was when I was a teenager, so it must have been more than five or six years ago – but we went to the house after my grandpa had passed and I just remember, for the first time in my life, really seeing my grandma open up to us and to the family. It was a really profound moment, this woman who had been so quiet and so reserved around us, who we knew loved us but who was never very outwardly affectionate.
Anyway, my uncle wrote a short story and it’s incredible, it’s very moving, and before the book came out, I had been talking to Brad about this and he forwarded me the first draft of the story. After reading it, I knew immediately it had to be a part of the record, and it was a perfect partner for the song that became the first track, “HUDSONVILLE MI 1956”. So I think when I read that story was when I knew that those songs needed to be there – the historical songs, the dated songs – so that was a pretty important event in the writing process."
Q&A
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- 6.35
- 8.THE CHILD WE LOST 1963
- 11.Objects in Space
