Dear Even Hansen “Found Me”: How a Broadway Musical Helped Me Grieve
By Meghan Riordan Jarvis
Like many of the hard things in my family, my father’s diagnosis was announced with a practiced emotional sleight of hand. My mother slipped the word “cancer” between descriptions of unseasonable weather and early blooming roses, and cushioned with “we expect everything to be fine,” so subtly worry almost didn’t register. Hours later I found myself in a thought just like a movie scene of : “wait a minute…”
I’m a “tell me everything” bad-news kind of gal. I want expert opinions, and lots of them. I want the white blood cell count, the correct spellings of medications, and for every person who has been even adjacent to a similar story to take me through, day by day , what to expect. Information soothes me and unfortunately, I was raised in a “shake it off, you’ll be fine, let’s just wait and see” kind of household
That’s not to say my parents didn’t seek treatment. My father had as many rounds of chemo as his body could tolerate before the medicine transformed back into poison and began to kill rather than cure him. He fought, but even with the best chemical artillery, small cell cancer is a battle that is typically ends within a year.
My parents and a few of my siblings did not exactly bright side the severity of my father’s diagnosis but seemed to me to be wearing sunglasses despite the clouds. I sought my own experts, cried in the car and the shower, and ultimately decided to try and spend more time with him while he was quickly and quietly dying.
On a short visit late in his diagnosis, that became a long visit, my father was in the ER within a few hours upon my arrival home. In a sort of, slow, quick, quick, quick my father’s doctor’s box stepped him into a surgery that that would hopefully stem pain they’d yet been able to get under a nine. My mother and I were assured the procedure was routine so thought nothing of me staying while my mom returned home to water her early blooming roses.
Back in his room a few hours later, my father pain free and smiling, flirty with the nurses and perhaps most remarkable, hungry for the first time in weeks. We called him in some tomato soup which he slurped it happily, right up until his face squeezed tight with pain and his head snapped back at an unnatural angle. In an instant the room was filled with beeping and running and screaming.
I was screaming.
A woman so absurdly young she could hardly be the medical personnel she claimed to be, guided me by the elbow to the corner of the room and spoke to me in a hushed tone oddly audible despite the chaos. “You should think about calling anyone who might want to come,” she explained, but hours had passed, and it neared 2 am. My people were too far or too asleep to make the phone call worthwhile.
The nurse walked away, but I stood breathless and planted. I was afraid if I moved I would detonate Never have I felt so crowded and completely, and utterly alone.
The life that surged in panic inside me, fought the death in the room until dawn.
Somehow, my father managed to not die. He came out of his forced sedation teary, and grateful. Stilled by emotional pins and needles, I’d stood like a statute for so long I did not trust myself to move without collapse, but still managed to kiss his forehead and tell him to sleep.
Finally, I crept out of my father’s room, through the silent, overly bright halls of the hospital into the chilly morning air of life outside where the sun was just beginning to rise. I closed my eyes and as the glowing pink covered my face and suddenly heard music.
The tune was familiar but not something I could quite say I knew. I was surprised to discover the notes came from inside me and even more so when I began to hum.
Taking a deep breath, I walked toward my car, shaking out the panic and grief still tight in my hands and feet the way a dog shakes off a fear.
Suddenly, I recognized myself. The song was something I’d heard.
It had been more than a year, maybe two. My husband had bribed me to meet him at an unheard-of play that was still being workshopped in previews nowhere near our house in DC, with the promise of tacos from my favorite food truck. We sat five rows from the front and though I’d never even heard of Ben Platt, I would never forget him.
The plot of Dear Evan Hansen was enough to overwhelm me even when I wasn’t grieving. Ben Platt gutting his way through the soundtrack is what did me in. Written by then relatively unknown Benji Pasek and Justin Paul (who are also the geniuses responsible for the Greatest Showman), the first act ends with the ethereal song sung through tears by Platt, “You Will Be Found.”
I only drove for a minute wishing I could recall the words to match the tune, when it occurred to me that the play had made it to Broadway. I pulled over and searched iTunes where I quickly found the soundtrack, and my specific song. As I hooked my phone up to my rental car speaker, and chills exploded across my body as the first bars of the song began, I understood the unexpected echoes of my mind.
Like a sense memory I was transported back to that DC theater frozen in emotional overload. I held my breath until the lights came up at intermission, afraid of exploding in sobs if I so much as twitched when my cheerful, thirsty husband asked if I wanted a drink from the bar. Like a woman of with gun between her shoulder blades, “I’m afraid to move” was all I could manage say.
My body remembered, though my mind may not have. On the brink of similar emotional overwhelm my memory stitched the musical’s soundtrack to my sense of lonely and alone and Just like that my hero’s journey earned itself an anthem. I would mark next few weeks of my father’s dying with the accompaniment of a stirring musical score, and velvet voice of the emotionally destroyed Ben Platt.
Evan Hansen’s story is one of isolation, self-destruction, and multiple layers of deep and profound grief. By the time my dad died the show and the actors had won all of the awards, the tickets were the cost of a college tuition but slightly less than a drug habit.
But it was my drug, taking me away from the impossible moments, offering me a melody of sweet relief. I cried for Evan, for Connor, for Zoe and their parents, and in doing so managed not to cry just for me or my father and the people who loved him.
The counter on my phone says the song is my most listened to by a longshot — something like 6,000 times. There were days when I had it one air pod in, soundtrack on looped repeat. I eventually saw the show again on Broadway, five times actually.
None of us really knows how to grieve. It’s skill we grow by necessity as we go. On anniversaries and those inevitable random hard days, I turn up the volume on Ben Platt and Rachel Bay Jones and their castmates and allow the grief in my body swell with the notes. Songs have a cadence, a beginning a middle and an end which provide the perfect scaffolding for a few minutes deep in my feelings. Some days one song is all I need, on others, I listen until the soundtrack the whole way through. I know my grief will never end, but at least I can trust the music will find me, whenever I need it.
“Have you ever felt like nobody was there?
Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?
Have you ever felt like you could disappear?
Like you could fall, and no one would hear?
Well, let that lonely feeling wash away
Maybe there’s a reason to believe you’ll be okay
’Cause when you don’t feel strong enough to stand
You can reach, reach out your hand
And oh, someone will coming running
And I know, they’ll take you home
Even when the dark comes crashing through
When you need a friend to carry you
And when you’re broken on the ground
You will be found
So let the sun come streaming in
’Cause you’ll reach up and you’ll rise again
Lift your head and look around
You will be found”
You Will Be Found-Pasek & Paul
Meghan Riordan Jarvis is a trauma and grief-informed psychotherapist, speaker, educator, writer, podcast host, wife, and mother of three. After losing both her parents within two years of each other she began Grief Is My Side Hustle. (www.griefismysidehustle.com) where she runs a free online grief writing workshop. Meghan is a 2021 Zibby Owens’ “Moms Don’t Have Time To” writing fellow and is currently working on a memoir about trauma and grief , and how sometimes what we lose is ourselves.
