Music Takes Us To The Light

It all seemed to start a long time ago in what feels like another life. It may well have been true and certainly was my experience. It was that feeling of leaving your body and hoping that when you wake up you can pinch yourself and find out that it was all a dream, one bad dream. Yet my family’s fate turned out to be one that you could not pinch away nor change by simply wishing.

It started with the experience of my wife becoming dizzy during a summer trip to Italy and ended up in her untimely passing at home. We did not see this coming after a very successful run in the fashion business which we ran together. In fact who would ever think that their imminent retirement might end in such a long and painful way? Yet this was to be our fate and one we could not alter or change. At first it was difficult for us to accept my wife’s illness, then more difficult to adapt to and in the end to succumb to. Her diagnosis was one of a disease so rare no one had ever heard of it. There are less than 50,000 cases of MSA (Multiple Systemic Atrophy) ever recorded, very rare indeed. Not as rare as the life that it took with it this time.

I had to learn to fill my time in ways other than sitting, gazing at my wife asking her what she might need at any given moment. I was feeling the overwhelming gravity of having to part with her after twenty amazing years. I also had to deal with caring for our young teenage daughter who was about to lose her mother. For me, as it turned out, making music was my answer. My wife encouraged me to pursue something that I passionate about and I smartly took her lead.

At first it was my way to share the pain and ease the power of grief through song. I had been a guitar player and song writer throughout my younger years on and off in between career changes. I came to realize that there was no better way to express my feelings so directly. I was a bit rusty and my first songs came slowly and were a bit sad but then all of a sudden the spirit of the music itself seemed to take over. The sounds I made became somehow comforting and in turn, positive and joyful. Thoughts turned to words which became lyrics in which my story first unfolded, and eventually healing and extended on to new beginnings. It became my journal of love and grief, rebirth and happiness, remembrance and eventually thankfulness.

My daughter and I may have shed our share of tears, we may have felt the depths of darkness but somehow we managed to embrace our fate and not only survive but move ahead with our lives. We actually captured this spirit together in a ballad I wrote and sang as a duet with my daughter. We gave this song to my late wife as a gift on Mothers Day right before she passed.

This tragedy which could have broken us for good instead has to this day instead brought us a gift. It helped to create an amazing legacy, one that will live on and always be part of my story, spoken in beautiful lyrics set to my own music. The wife and mother who we have lost may be gone, but her spirit will always remain in our hearts revealed in the beautiful music I created out of love. The sheer power of music and the ability to turn my emotions into song helped to save my family.

Music Takes Us To The Light.

For More Information on Robert Kantor visit: www.robertkantormusic.com

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