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The following post was also published on the Irish Times website as part of a collective tribute to David Bowie from Irish writers Julian Gough, Joseph O’Connor, Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, Eimear McBride, Hugo Hamilton, John Kelly, John McAuliffe and many others –  David Bowie: Irish Writers Pay Tribute 

It was just after one o’clock in the morning. On my bedside table, a tiny screen lit up with a message from another planet and three words that still don’t belong together: “Bowie is dead.“

David Bowie is dead. 

It was cancer that took him, a cancer he kept private from this world – my world – of which he was so much a part yet always apart.

David Bowie had cancer. 

Four words that do not belong together.

The strange and unsettling sounds of Black Star had filled the rooms of my house since the album’s release on his 69th birthday, just three days before.  “Lazarus” had stopped me in my tracks that weekend, prompting me to mention to my daughter that I thought it sounded like the work of a man at the end of his life – a brilliant man who for decades had illuminated the edges of my life – my world – with his sound and vision. I didn’t dwell on the thought. Maybe I didn’t want to tempt fate.

In the middle of any David Bowie song, I still find bits and pieces of the stories of my life. My favorite color, the best to wear for a television camera, is blue, “blue, blue electric blue.” The ring-tone on my phone reminds me who I think I am, mostly at inopportune times when I might be sitting at a conference table, uncomfortable in an ill-fitting suit.

“Rebel, Rebel!”

Relentless, it blares out “How could they know? Hot Tramp I love you so.” Hot tramp. Swirling in my brain when I am lonely on a Saturday, “Let me put my arms around your head. Gee, it’s hot, let’s go to bed.”  Or on just another  day when I’m in the deep end again, but unafraid because  I know that  “we can be heroes, just for one day.”  We can do anything.

We’re a different kind.

Beginnings and endings. Question marks. Full stops. A pause. A change of key.  A change of heart. A post-script. A footnote.

Always, always a Bowie song.

Ain’t there one damn song that can make me
break down and cry?

More than one.

Selfishly, I want you bound to earth again, David Bowie, and all the young dudes to carry the news. I want Time to take a cigarette with Ziggy on guitar, and forever –  forever – to just let the children boogie.

Bowie is dead.

I am reminding myself of  the way my late husband responded to Lou Reed’s passing. I recall his profound sadness over the death of the strange stranger who somehow knew him and his wild side better than I ever did. I know that now.  He refused to talk about Lou Reed’s death. It was his struggle, I suppose, with the reality that there would be no more new tales from the dirty boulevard. And, maybe there was something else, a psychic inkling that just 18 days later, he would fly, fly away too.

I compromised.  In lieu of a conversation at our kitchen table, I wrote instead about the death of Lou Reed.  It was just twelve days before her father died, that I set down on paper a memory of the first time my only child discovered her beautiful hands. For me, her besotted mother, it was on the edge of magic. We called it  “hand ballet.”  And she, transfixed, staring intently, unblinking, at those little fingers that in a twinkling would cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, create pictures, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears.

Suspended in one singular  thought,  my baby girl and the late Lou Reed their elegant hands in motion – she saying hello to her hands, he waving goodbye.  His wife, Laurie Anderson, wrote that Lou Reed spent most of his last days on earth “being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on a Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.”

Beginnings and endings.

So that weekend before he died, I listened to “Lazarus” and David Bowie telling the world he would be free – just like that bluebird – taking me back to the sunny drive-in  Saturday before I gave birth to my daughter, eighteen years before.  Standing with her father in the space that would become her first place, I was nervous and unprepared for the extent to which our lives were about to change.  Absolute beginners, we absolutely loved each other, and the rest could go to hell.

Superstitious, we had decided not to find out if I was carrying a boy or a girl. The nursery was ‘gender neutral,’ its sole splash of color a painting of animals and birds in a forest, vibrant and wild in primary colors. I do not remember the details of our conversation that afternoon, but I remember a pause, when that man of mine peered into the painting and pointed out the bluebird perched in dark green foliage. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“Look.” he said.  “A little bluebird of happiness – waiting for our new baby. A bluebird of happiness. Isn’t that something.”

It was. It  was something.  It was a moment – a moment we clung to as long as we could. We were absolutely happy,  we were creatures in the wind, we were Pretty Things. We were heroes.

Thank you, David Bowie, for dazzling me with your ch-ch-ch-ch-changes so I have never been afraid of mine. For keeping me young and curious and hopeful even on the darkest of days, I absolutely loved you.

Is it any wonder? 

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