Joined at The Hip

I feel like I shouldn’t feel as devastated as I feel… if that makes any sense.

I was never a “die hard” Tragically Hip fan. The first time I ever really remember hearing them was the summer after I was in grade five. Ahead By a Century came out and I would watch the sepia video on Much Music while I waited for my friends to come over on their bikes. Those were the days before social media and cell phones, when kids would actually play. We would ride our bikes through the field yelling, “and that’s when the hornet stung me!” trying to look cool in front of the older kids playing basketball in our neighbourhood courts.

Then suddenly after a blur of Spice Girls and Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears, I was in high school. My best friend started dating a guy who had his own car. It was awful. A rusted out old white hatchback. The ugliest thing you would ever see, but it was freedom. We would cruise around downtown St. John’s with all two of the windows down blaring the Music @ Work album. By the end of the year, I knew every word to every song without really listening to them. Without appreciating them. Without understanding them.

In 2002, In Violet Light came out. I remember having my first kiss with my high school sweetheart, It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken playing softly from his computer speakers. To this day, Music @ Work and In Violet Light always draw out memories of forbidden fires in fields, first kisses, secret beer and running from park patrol. All the best times.

I met the man I would eventually marry in my final year of nursing school. So much of our time was spent in his Kia Rio, secretly meeting in parking lots because we were both in relationships at the time. We would sit, wasting gas, wasting time, singing all the words to Gus: The Polar Bear from Central Park. We stopped talking for a while, both too deep in our other relationships to realize what we had sitting in front of us. One night we ran into each other at a bar downtown and he convinced me to come back to his apartment for a beer. I didn’t like beer. He didn’t have any anyway. He put on Day for Night and spilled his feelings to me while Thugs played from his Panasonic five disc CD changer. Then he kissed me for the first time.

That was in August. In September I was his girlfriend and invited to camp in his hometown with he and his friends. We sat around a campfire drinking and laughing and singing everything from slow songs like Fiddler’s Green, to songs that demanded you dance like Gord while you sing them, like New Orleans is Sinking and Poets. Upon finishing a particularly energetic version of Fireworks, Brad looked at me and slurred, “Well Jesus. A woman who knows all the words to Fireworks. I got to marry you now.”

Roughly seven months later, he popped the question. At our engagement party he and the group of his friends who would be his groomsmen drunkenly serenaded me with Long Time Running, emphasizing the lyrics, “if you put me against my friends, you’ll be left out in the cold.”

Subtle, guys.

In the wee hours, we cleaned up my parent’s house (the elegant engagement party venue) while drinking and storytelling and listening to Pigeon Camera with Brad’s best friend Mike and his girlfriend, Kate. Brad was drunk and sentimental and I don’t think any of us could count how many times he played that song over that night.

Not long after we got married, I got pregnant. Suddenly there was less time for music and concerts and our weekends were filled with diapers and catching up on sleep. We moved to another town. We had another baby. We settled in to a routine. The Hip released concert dates and one was only an hour and a half drive from where we lived. Our son was only a baby at the time and still breastfeeding throughout the night and sleeping like a complete jerk, so Brad hit the concert solo. It was the first time I was home alone with both kids and wouldn’t you know it, they both started vomiting. I called Brad, phone tucked between my ear and shoulder, frantically running the bath and stripping the beds, just needing to talk to an adult for a few precious seconds to maintain my sanity. He answered the phone but all that I could hear on the other end of the line was Gord.

Sadly, in this situation, he was of no assistance to me.

As I listened to The Hip in my adulthood though, I began to appreciate the music, but the writing even more. Gordon Downey was a poet. His ability to string words together, to tell stories, to put them to music; it was nothing short of amazing. He was magnificent. A true entertainer. He was so many words that I can’t imagine using to describe many other men. And he was all ours. He never quite broke into the American music scene, but that made him even better. He was our secret. Our hidden gem. His chords wove us together as a country. As a family.

And then he got sick. And even though I think we always knew how unreal this guy was; how unreal this band was, I don’t think it really sunk in until he was slipping through our fingers. When you grow up to this music carrying you through every milestone, every moment from meeting your soulmate to running to the grocery store for cereal, it becomes part of the background. I feel like I kind of forgot it was there until it wasn’t anymore. Like the hum of the refrigerator missing when the power goes out.

Brad saw their last show in Toronto. I can not express how happy I am that he did. He has been a true, die hard Tragically Hip fan since I met him. I elected to stay home because I thought this was too important. I didn’t love them like he did. I loved them, but not the true love of so many fans I have seen. I knew in my heart that this was it, and I knew that I couldn’t take a ticket from someone who lived and breathed The Tragically Hip.

The night of their final show in Kingston, Brad went back to his hometown to watch the show on a big screen with the boys he grew up with. The way it should be. I watched it in bits on a computer at work, and then again, the next day PVR’d. Stifling my tears at work, weeping openly on my couch.

And now we’re here. And Gord isn’t. And social media is flooded, and the Prime Minister is crying on television, and even the churches are paying homage to him on their parking lot signs. And I wonder did he know how loved he was? How much he meant to us as a nation? How he represented everything that was Canada, and how he raised us with his music?

I never met the man. I didn’t own every album. I didn’t know every word to every song. And yet I feel his absence heavy on my chest. His music was the soundtrack to my life. To all of our lives. Whether we were fans or not, he was always there. Serenading us through the every day. And even though we will always have his music, the silence is somehow deafening now that he is gone.

I feel like I shouldn’t feel as devastated as I feel… but I do.

He brought us together for everything from hockey games to campfires. And now here we are, collectively joined again because of Gord.