I was listening to Garnet Rogers' song
Night Drive,
about his memories of his brother Stan and thinking, as I always do, about what a
shattering loss
href="http://stevebriggs.superb.net/stanrogers/biog.html">Stan's death must
have been to Garnet. Of course it generally does suck to have a sibling die, but
in one moment, thanks to some moron smoking in an airplane lavatory, Garnet lost a
major part of his life. These guys were brothers both in terms of shared parents
and in the sense in which some men like to use the word for a friend who is as
much a part of you as your own bones, and they were partners in their own
work. At the time Stan died, his was the bigger name and most of his records list
Garnet as arranger and backup musician, but it's clear from their later CDs and
from Stan's published comments that Garnet was integral to the music they made
together. In one moment in 1983, Garnet lost his brother, his best friend, and a
major portion of his job. (He went on to produce and back up other people, to
write his own songs, and to perform on his own, and is now a big name (in folk
circles - these things are relative) as a solo performer. I highly recommend his
album All That
Is.
I thought about how awful and how unusual it would be to lose
so much with one death, until I realized that it's actually not uncommon.
Something of that magnitude happened to my great-grandmother when her husband died
of flu in 1918 and to her sister whose husband died in the War in 1917. It's
happened to millions of women who have lost husbands they depended on for food and
shelter as well as love and help in raising children. Worse than that, while those
women would have had the same burden of grief Garnet Rogers must have had, until
the last few decades most wouldn't have had a chance to go out on their own and
build their own as successfully as he did. (Not that many people of either gender
have talents as formidable as his, but that's a separate issue.) If a woman had to
depend on her own work, if she didn't remarry or have family to take her in, she
would have had to deal with crushing grief and a huge drop in standard of living
and her children's.
As many times as I've thought about Stan's death
before, I'd never thought of that parallel until this morning. First it hit me how
lucky I am and how far we've come; if I lost Rudder or any other part of my family
I would be grieving, but at least I wouldn't also have to worry about my
next meal or how I'd pay the mortgage. Even if we'd had a kid and I'd decided to
stay home with her I'd know I could go back to an office job if it were necessary.
My next thought was to realize how telling it is that, outspoken feminist that I
am, I had always thought about that loss from the point of view of men before, and
had never considered how common a similar loss would have been for women. We still
have some ways to go, or maybe it's just that I do. I'm not sure if this is
lingering prejudices or just me being oblivious.