Donna Vorreyer- Creative Nonfiction
What Ben Said Sarah Said
The opening piano run ascends and descends at once, like rain on a windshield, the way it creeps up as it falls down. My body follows, heart accelerating while my breath slows, my eyes blurring Ben Gibbard at the piano, the crowd at Thalia Hall, the colored lights, into a soft-focused haze. Despite seeing Ben and Death Cab for Cutie multiple times, “What Sarah Said” is not a typical set choice. I wasn’t expecting it at this solo show tonight.
My husband squeezes my shoulder. It is one of those moments when music and lyrics and memory combine to overwhelm me. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times, but on this night, I realize I have avoided it since my parents first fell ill and haven’t listened at all since they died. The first time I heard this song, the new album in my headphones on a run, the power of “What Sarah Said” stunned me to stillness. Fifteen years after that initial listen, my tears at this show are a response to a lived experience. I have watched someone die. Two someones.
As I get older, it is often without reason that certain phrasings or songs bring on the waterworks. Usually those songs are about connection, about love. Andrew McMahon’s poignant bridge lines before the chorus in “Cecilia and the Satellite.” The strange, nasal voice of Tom DeLonge hitting the soaring refrain in “The Adventure.” The soaring tenderness of “Space” by Biffy Clyro. Certain moments break the fourth wall of a song’s universe and seep into the bones, converging to create pure instinctual emotion. Some are easily explained, like the constant replaying of Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs” after a breakup with my first teen love, or my sobs at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago as the character of John in Miss Saigon sang “Bui Doi” during a time that we had just learned I would not be able to have children and had decided to adopt. But I became attached to specific songs during the long year of losing my parents. When I needed a cathartic cry, “Drown” by Bring Me the Horizon. Comfort? “Don’t Carry It All” by The Decemberists. But I avoided “What Sarah Said” at all costs. I was living each detail of the lyrics. I didn’t want to hear them.
2018 was a blur of hospital rooms, where there was indeed no comfort, but my phone remembered the WIFI. Home visits. Cleaning and diapering after accidents. Cleaning and dressing open wounds. Sorting and administering medications, including morphine. Entering the house to find my father sprawled on the floor after a fall. Helping the hospice nurse give my mother a sponge bath the day before she died, her body bird-frail, bruised and broken. Gently reminding my father that my mother wasn’t coming back. Visiting him in the nursing home (that did smell of piss and 409) every other day after work, other family members filling in the blanks. Holding his hands as he flailed in his final hours. All things I never imagined doing. All things I never thought would still wake me, filled with sorrow and guilt and regret. But they are a part of watching someone die. And in that intimate concert hall, as that piano run hit the air, all the grief I had been trying too hard to ignore pushed through. The tears for all I could not change came to wash me clean, to answer the question my parents had never posed. I love you, those tears say. I will watch you die. I did.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013) from Sundress Publications. She hosts the reading series 100 Pitchers of Honey and is co-founder/editor of the journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.