'Riser': From Grave to Cradle and Beyond

How a song came to embody a life.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

The moment crashes over you unannounced, sweeping you off the rocks - likely your very last moment. Everything you see is tinged with a painfully bright outline, as if life is trying to burn the last images you’ll see, not only into your brain, which in a minute you won’t need anymore, but into your soul. Sounds are jaggedly sharp, penetrating. Everything is impossibly clear. Everything has MEANING. You can’t believe this is it.

Or is it? I’ve died a couple of times, and though I have no proof to hold up to you that I did make it there and back, I know I did. Nothing in my experience has ever had such a clear ring of truth, clarity and now-ness than those experiences had. In fact, I later began to view this life as the Shadowlands, à la C.S. Lewis, and that real life was out there, beyond corporeal existence.

Part of me never came back. It stayed over there and this caused me considerable confusion, anger and anxiety for many years. I’ve now come to view living simultaneously in these two very distinct places as a gift, but it took me a long time to get there. I am a quantum object - super positioned.

The first time was fairly inconsequential. I had surgery for ovarian cancer when I was 28. It was caught soon enough or I wouldn’t be writing this. But I did find myself hovering over the operating table, watching with great fascination what the doctors did.

I filed that away as “extremely interesting, not really sure what happened, but… hmmmm”. Was I dead? Don’t know, but I was somewhere else.

The second time was wrenchingly melodramatic, the wave much bigger. I had a busted mitral valve which was losing its battle in pumping blood through my heart, time was short. I entertained the possibility I might not make it through the operation, and, on cue, as I went under, a thunderstorm unleashed its wrath on the city and the power went out. But hospitals are savvy about these sorts of things, so the generators picked up the slack till the power came back on. My partner was a wreck.

During the surgery, I woke up. The first thing I noticed was that there was a blue sheet over me, through which I could see the lights over us. I could hear the doctors talking, sounds of whirring machinery, and snip, snip, snip. The second thing I noticed was that I was colder than I’d ever been, and found out later that they liked to chill people down to staunch blood flow. The third thing I noticed when I turned my head, was that I was looking at a device on the ground, with my blood flowing through tygon tubing around a peristaltic pump. The assembly didn’t look like it had come out of a catalog…

I think I heard someone quietly say “uh oh…”. Immediately I shot out of my body through my feet and into a huge blue-black, fast moving, deliciously super cold river. There were millions of other souls in the river as well. I was on my back, moving fast, looking up at the stars when I realized I couldn’t identify any constellations.

OH MY GOD. I’m outside of space and time. I’m dead! - WOW - This feels so incredibly good - I feel more alive, focused, happy and calm than I have ever felt before.

Ohhhh… I’m so sorry to be leaving everyone, but they will be delighted when they experience this. Will they experience this? Or is everyone’s experience something completely unique to them? This is sooo wonderful…

WHAM. I’m back in my body. SHIT. I don’t want to be here, this is going to hurt. Maybe I can push myself out of my body again…

Nope. Stuck in my body. I spent the next five years in a depressed, pissed off state, trying to drag what I’d left behind back to this side, but it stubbornly refused. I’m over here and I LIKE IT. And so I had to make peace with that, with me.

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A long aside, but integral to how this song came about, and what happened after it was finished.

Five years ago my partner, Doug and I began writing Riser. He started it off with the intro, and the first line -

Rise from the ashes, my soul survives…

Crikey. This song is about reincarnation. Birth, life, death, repeat. It basically wrote itself, as if it had something to say - we just needed to get out of the way so it could.

Then COVID came, and we tinkered with it for two years, adding parts, having a great time letting it do exactly what it wanted to do. I mixed the bloody thing 99 times, a classic definition of insanity, in my quest to understand the mysteries of mixing. I never quite achieved what I’d hoped to hear, but eventually found an engineer who understood where it wanted to go.

We began creating a 3D animation to visualize the story within the song, and worked on it over a long while, squeezed in between paying work. Then reality hit - my repaired mitral valve began to fail following what I think was a very early bout of COVID late December 2019, before anyone really knew what we were dealing with. I limped along for more than two years.

And then Doug got kidney cancer. I bided my time as he embarked on rounds of immunotherapy and other drugs. It looked like he’d turned a corner, so I set a date to get a new mitral valve.

The next year and four months would be the toughest either of us had ever had, as we nursed me back to health, and very slowly watched him die.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I was working with a good friend in Seattle who’s a graphic designer, to help create some social media artwork in support of this song, which we were going to push to streaming December 1st of 2023. I had told her we might have to push that date out, since I wasn’t ready with the things I’d been building.

She cryptically yet emphatically told me that date had to stand. It HAD TO. I thought she was saying that to keep me motivated, which I appreciated, since it was difficult under the circumstances to keep anything moving forward. Doug had entered hospice at home months earlier, and life was a round the clock stream of medications and other care.

On December 1st, the song dropped on all major streaming platforms. That evening I played it for him on my phone, holding it up to him. Though he had been unable to speak, make eye contact, or react in any way for weeks by that point, when the song started playing, he reached for my hand, held it tightly, and looked at me continuously, lovingly, joyfully throughout the song. I told him we had done it - we had taken this idea from birth to rollout, and now it was finally out there in the world.

He died the next day.

So, this song is very important to me. It may not do anything for anyone else, but that was not its point. It’s point was to BE. And it draws me near to him every time I hear it.

I, I am alive! I am awake!

I’m no longer trapped, I’ve found my map

and know where I am bound.

I, I am alive! I don’t know why!

Time lays out before me, in endless glory,

turn this world around.

Shed my memories, shed my skin,

Won’t be long before I find my way back in.

He’s out there, you know. Whether I ever run into him again is anyone’s guess. But even if I don’t, just knowing that spark - that essence that each one of us is actually made of - continues to exist, will be enough for me. n=9 is the vehicle to launch the songs he and I wrote.

For Douglas Randle Huff. I miss you.

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