Mourning ritual
Neither I, nor the band, made it through the launch party for Richard Laviolette’s All Wild Things Are Shy without crying. The album, years in the making, one posthumously, was written between his mother’s death from Huntington’s and his own in 2023. I did not know Richard, other than as an audience member at concerts over the last decade, but it felt like nearly everyone else in the venue did. I saved it to listen to live, sung by his friends and family and bandmates stepping into fill the words he’d left behind for them — part mourning ritual; part celebration of a creative talent — before settling in at home to hear him sing the originals.
Matt Horseman, writing in the Globe and Mail says: “Death hovers like a spectre over the record, though no nihilistic sense of doom pervades it. Richard’s understanding that his days were numbered amplifies the power behind lyrics that tell about love, resilience and joy, but his pain isn’t glossed over, either. It has the effect of a dear friend looking you directly in the eyes and telling you, in no uncertain terms, what’s coming.”
The album opens with “Mildweed and Motherwort”: Lately my heart’s been beating like a barking dog / And the spit from the flickering flames has left me disarmed / Lately my heart’s been empty as a hollow log / The glow hangs by the belly of a cloud over where you are / Lately it seems I’m tired and I don’t know why.
It still feels like a miracle to listen to music at all, especially live, where I can’t control the volume, and in English, where I can’t help but do the extra labour of untangling words from instrumentation and make meaning from sound. Since getting sick with a virus that crosses into the brain, I have been working my way up from a life of utter silence to small classical ensembles and single vocalists using their voice like a wordless yowl. The first long drive I could handle accompaniment, a lover picked out Arabic music to keep me company while she napped and I let it wash over me undifferentiated, no need for GPS on a straight-shot highway, the intimacy of a small car meeting the intimacy of inviting someone in to the music you love.
It’s a shock to regain what I thought was a lost art, at least temporarily. All Wild Things Are Shy is the first album I have listened to straight through since 2020, to sing along with the chorus of friends and collaborators singing with Richard, to look up from the lyrics and remember the words I just read, and have music be a comfort and not a symptom flare or a rehabilitation exercise.
On “Welcome Back” he sings: Earned a few more crooked teeth / Your eyes are shadow caves / If you were at the gates of hell / You’d be turned away / Some friends, you don’t think of them / Too much when they’re gone / The thought is overpowering / Too potent and too strong / Just survived the longest storm / From November to May / The first time now in many months I kind of feel OK. It’s hard to mourn a moving target of fluctuating health. Some days I wake well enough to pretend, even to myself, and others I wake at the gates of hell, too sick even to enter.
Long COVID is not the same as Huntington’s except in the way that all serious illnesses force you to use your passport to Susan Sontag’s Kingdom of the Sick to pass through the longest storm, the way all life or death symptoms render the world in the blaring triage light of the hospital. Huntington’s is genetic and progressive. Huntingtin protein is toxic to brain cells, beginning first in the subcortical basal ganglia and striatum, and progressing into the cerebral cortex, impacting the cortial connections that control movement, mood, and higher cognitive function. His obituary notes “the symptoms affected his ability to sing and play the guitar, and they made the decision making about song arrangements much more laboured and difficult.”
On the title track, he sings: All wild things are shy / That’s what makes this all so rare / That I might catch your eye. How some lovers or creative projects have to be approached like a cat, waiting til they come to you. How illness can make you feel like a wild pained thing unsuitable for polite company, clumsy over the rituals of social connection and the space they need to thrive.
How illness also can build community, connecting people from different realms of your life in waiting rooms and rituals, through gestures of care and grief. Niko Stratis writes, about the album but also a lifetime of music: “Richard wrote songs that built pictures of a life, chords that make the dirt under his feet so alive you might feel what he feels, a voice like a blade that makes incisions in the sky to show the stars hidden there. Richard wrote songs that felt like home, any home at all, even the homes you have yet to know.”
I do not know yet what I will leave behind to keep my loved ones company but I know this illness will eventually kill me, whether by sudden stroke or accelerated aging or an immune system primed to exhaust itself fighting every new exposure or my own rotting spirit, new symptoms or the same endless unsolvable ones swimming up out of the dark. In “Pack It Up”, he sings: By the end of the year / You’ll lose something you hold dear / Under the weight of / The biting wind and snow / At the bottom of the ocean / The water rots the will / The darkness swims around you / Your body is so still.
This month especially I feel disarmed by what can go critically, inarticulately wrong in my body; by my failed attempts to use words to mend things and self-advocate. I write this from the ER waiting room weighted down with a problem too complex for family medicine but too urgent to wait for a specialist. I hope, at least, that what I leave is as beautiful and biting as All Wild Things Are Shy.
The album closes with a song it’ll be hard to hear as anything other than sung for rather than by its maker, by a community of musicians who loved him: You were a constant love / A shelter from the storms above / You were a constant love / You're in my heart and in my blood.
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about the aesthetics and labour of illness, the science of salt, and the failures of public health. To support this project, share it online or subscribe. The series is intentionally not behind a paywall, to ensure broad access to patients and timely circulation of information in our evolving public health crisis, but paid subscriptions are welcome.