Products |
Weekend Butler: Life happens through people.
Published: Apr 07, 2022
Category:
Weekend
Life happens through people. And when it doesn’t? A character test begins. You grind it out. You look to the sky and ask for help.
That was March for me. And then… life rebooted. A friend was asked to do a project. It wasn’t right for her. She flipped it to me, and it’s just right. I got a surprising, over the top comment about my book from a director I taught 40 years ago. I wanted to send the manuscript of my book to Richard Gere, so I asked one of his friends for his contact information. That led to a conversation about someone dear to me, recently estranged and likely to remain estranged, and suddenly we were texting, healing the rift. All that in a week.
Now to Jon Batiste. You may know him as Stephen Colbert’s band leader. Last year he released a CD that received 11 Grammy nominations. This week, he won for best video and album of the year.
What you want to know about Jon Batiste. His band is named Stay Human, because he believes that human interaction during a live musical performance connects people to a sense of shared humanity. He’s from Louisiana. The video that won the Grammy was made in New Orleans. To watch it is to know joy — and to know him.
The reason I’m writing about him: Just before his 35th birthday and all those Grammy nominations, his wife, Suleika Jaouad, received a new diagnosis. Leukemia. She’d had it before, was in remission, had written a book, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. Now it was back, and far more aggressive than it had been a decade ago.
In a CBS interview, she recalled, “We’re sitting in this chemo suite together, and these phone calls of congratulation are coming in. And we’re having to hold these two realities. It’s holding the absolutely gutting, heartbreaking, painful things, and the beautiful, soulful things in the same palm of one hand. And it’s hard to do that, but you have to do that, because otherwise the grief takes over.”
Jaouad felt “utterly isolated.” She shared that. “And next thing I know, I see Jon hunched over his computer. Half an hour later, he starts playing this lullaby. And every single day after that, he wrote me a new lullaby. It felt like he was right there sleeping by my bedside.”
For Batiste, that response was obvious: “There’s a healing property to music. I filled the room with these healing properties. For me, that’s my way. Everybody will have their way, you know, but seek that. Meditate on that. Focus on those things. Find those things.”
It’s a lovely story. For Batiste, it’s more than that: “It’s an act of defiance. The darkness will try to overtake you, but just turn on the light. Focus on the light. Hold onto the light.”
I had some other stories I was going to share — the perfidy of Facebook, a recipe, some gorgeous music — but they’ll hold. Today, nothing tops focusing on the light and holding onto it.
[gratitude to DKC and KMM]
