Grieving the death of a parent can be incorporated into our moral lives because it’s part of the natural order of things, but there is no proper way to grieve the death of a child. It is not natural grief. It is alien, disordered, lawless, intrusive, obnoxious, repugnant. It is a festering sore that never heals; a scab ripped away anew every day. No day—no minute—is ever as it should be; never as it should have been.
Parents are not supposed to bury their children.
When they do, I am told by friends who have, the grief never goes away. It lingers like a stench deep in one’s nostrils—a constant reminder that things are not right any longer and never will be again.
Parents are not supposed to bury their children.
Nevertheless — and like many other parents — singer-songwriter Steve Earle had to bury his son, 38-year-old fellow musician Justin Townes Earle, who died from an accidental overdose of cocaine laced with fentanyl on 20 August 2020.
I have been a long-time fan of both father and son, and even met J.T. briefly outside the Cincinnati venue where my daughter Margaret and I saw him perform once. I asked him, as he posed for a photograph with Margaret, whether he had any intention of recording with his father. “No,” he chuckled, “that would not end well.”
This was consistent with public confessions of both men that theirs was a at times a stormy relationship, immortalized in J.T.’s song, “Mama’s Eyes,” for example:
I am my father’s son
I’ve never known when to shut up
I ain’t fooling no one
I am my father’s son
We don’t see eye to eye
And I’ll be the first to admit I’ve never tried
It sure hurts me, it should hurt sometime
We don’t see eye to eye
But J.T. longed for the presence and approval of Steve, as he expressed in in his song, “Am I that Lonely Tonight”:
Sometimes I wish that I could get away
Sometimes I wish that he’d just call
Am I that lonely tonight, I don’t know…
Father and son were also publicly candid about their addictions. “I was a young man when I first found the pleasure of a sin,” J.T. confessed, and “went down the same road as my old man.” Steve recently told Ben Sisario of The New York Times, “I was connected to him in ways that, you know — he’s my first born, he did the same thing I did and we both had this disease.” Steve Earle has been clean and sober for decades now. J.T. had significant periods of sobriety, but he was never quite able to break those chains.
So in late August 2020, Steve had to bury his son, something parents are not supposed to do.
To cope with (one doesn’t “work through”) the abnormal grief of the unnatural business, Steve made an album of ten of J.T.’s songs, and a new one of his own, “Last Words.” Steve released the album, J.T., on January 4 (J.T.’s birthday), directing all proceeds to a trust for the benefit Steve’s young, now fatherless three-year-old granddaughter.
With a couple of exceptions that seem to have been chosen just because Steve likes them, the songs Steve selected for the album attest J.T.’s pain, loneliness, isolation, and disorientation that almost certainly are associated with his persistent addiction. Steve sings these songs like they were written for him. There’s mourning in his voice and weariness in his tone, as he sometimes grunts out the lyrics. He wears the songs like an old beloved coat, taking what comfort he can from the artistry of his son, while singing about that son’s alienation and sadness.
In “I Don’t Care,” J.T. wrote, “I don’t know where I’m going/I don’t know and I don’t care/Anywhere but here/Anywhere at all/I’m just looking for a change.” And in “Far Away in Another Town”:
Standing outside in the pouring rain
Every half an hour them trains come rollin’ back again
So the next time you come lookin’ I won’t be around
Cuz I think I can be lonesome faraway in another town
Somewhere where the wind blows just as cold
Well I think I can be lonesome on my own
From the chilling title song of J.T.’s last album, The Saint of Lost Causes, Steve growls out his son’s desperation like a ghost from the grave,
For so long I was like a wounded hound
Backed into a chain link fence
The world at large was just a big, mean kid
Poking me through the fence with a stick
. . .
Now there’s nothing can be done
It’s just the way it goes
First you get bad then you get mean
Then there’s nothing left but to grow cold
And pray to the Saint of Lost Causes
Some will say I’ve got no feelings
No heart, surely no shame
Truth is that this been with me so long
I must admit I kind of like the pain
Steve delivers these brutal lines with a grinding intensity that crunches to the bone, leaving the listener feeling the sadness from the both the form and the matter of this bleak song. It’s difficult to account for such a desperately excruciating and despondent lyric. And a father cannot overcome the grief of burying the son who wrote them: “I never loved anything in the world more than him,” he told Sisario.
But Steve shares his grief in the therapeutic, lovely-sad final song of the album “Last Words,” written to J.T. after his death, and whispered over a deep, rumbling base line and brooding melody.
Don’t know why you hurt so bad
Just know you did and it makes me sad
Said everything I knew to say
Could not make it go away
. . .
You made me laugh, made me cry
Showed me truth and told me lies
Tore my heart apart and then
Brought me back the piece again
From Steve’s and J.T.’s independent accounts of their often tempestuous relationship, we know that many of their conversations over the years must have ended in bitter and angry words. We also know what were their very last words to one another:
Last time we spoke was on the phone
Then we hung up and now you’re gone
. . .
Now I don’t know what I’ll do
Until the day I follow you
Through the darkness to the light
Cause I loved you for all your life
Last thing I said was I love you
Your last words to me were I love you too
There were long periods of resentment, during which they were estranged from one another. But they had been reconciled. The last time they spoke, it was by telephone. It was 20 August 2020.
Kenneth Craycraft is an attorney and the James J. Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology, in Cincinnati.
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