‘The Yawning Grave’: Song #6 from the Boundless soundtrack

In BOUNDLESS, I consider the path to rejuvenation means a circuit back through a time in life when you asked your most existential questions. Or, why ninth grade doesn't suck—maybe it prepared you!

Dec 26, 2024

Somedays, when the twins were teenagers, I would catch their faces and be struck by their brilliant light. My goodness, I would think with astonishment, they burn so brightly!

In the same moment, I would pick up on how very existential they were. It wasn’t that they thought about death so much. Clearly, through their music, book and movie choices, they were taking their minds to the edges of all the questions about what it means to be alive. What it means to be a self. Why even be a self?

One of my daughter Grace’s covers was “A Girl, a Boy and a Graveyard,” in which a girl named Lucy tells the singer, “Life’s a game we’re meant to lose.” It’s a story about a girl and a boy who trauma-bond around depression. Composer Jeremy Messersmith says it draws directly, nearly word-for-word, from a conversation in his life.

In an interview with Best New Bands, Messersmith says, “Depression can be a strange whirlpool, drawing people together in spinning cyclones of emotion. It can also provide a stable common ground, one that acknowledges our shared human condition. As depressing as this song can be, I hope it serves the latter function!”

For parents of teenagers, this existential dance between brilliance and despair can be frightening to observe. In BOUNDLESS, I learn that the path to reinventing yourself, no matter what stage of life you’re in, involves a circuit back through these questions.

From reckoning to rejuvenation

Call it a dark night of the soul, call it a reckoning, Or call it a rejuvenation. A necessary branch of the path seems to be the need to test your fully burning life force against the tender miracle of being alive in the first place.

I invite you to consider your own hard-forged path through the angsty questions of adolescence. When I look back, I see how that existential time of my life as a fourteen-year-old burning brightly informed my Chapter Three, as a mother who had raised her children and now must enter the next passage of life.

It turned out to be a superpower that I had entered adulthood having already faced all the questions about why we even exist and why we must matter. Ninth grade hadn’t sucked—ninth grade had prepared me for the hard quests ahead.

The pull of the yawning grave

Further into life, the pull grows strong to the yawning grave, the sense that somehow somewhere the grave is already being dug for you. Wait a minute, I wanted to say as the empty nest approached and more and more, it seemed like people were ready for me to get off stage, slide off to a quiet, invisible retirement. I’m just getting started, I wanted to say. I’ve collected all this wisdom. I have so much more to offer. This isn’t the life stage before death!

But no, the losses were piling up. I was growing more accustomed to ending things than beginning things. And there it was, the yawning grave.

This describes the way I felt at the beginning of the events in BOUNDLESS, when at mid-life it seemed there was no way out, getting out from under a dying print journalism industry and into something vibrant and life-giving.

What I absolutely knew: If I didn’t do something, the yawning grave was waiting for me. Unless I changed something I would feel dead before I was truly dead.

This is why I accepted an opportunity 2,200 miles away in Saratoga Springs, NY, to run a magazine and be part of building a media empire.

Let yourself be feral

The hunger in me was almost feral. I describe BOUNDLESS as “the story of one woman’s urgent beckoning to become someone more authentically herself.”

Feral is frightening. It will find what it needs to find. I remembered this feral hunger in the twins, about the time they emerged from middle school and went onto high school. Something urgent fueled their questions and lit up their determination to be themselves.

This scene takes place during college decision season, when any questions about college were room-emptying talk.

EXCERPT from BOUNDLESS

I threw myself into this risky territory because I love their wit and brilliance, their thirst to create a life that’s uniquely their own.

My role as mother has been vista gatherer and sounding board as

I’ve listened to a ferocious accumulation of preferences. What they

don’t want is denounced loudly; what they do want is announced

early and often but always changing. Not always do they say what

they really want. Often, if I’ve failed to calibrate the time limit on

these conversations, they can tilt into sudden nihilism. All things

family can be scorched into existential meaninglessness by a single

errant extra word.

The song, “The Yawning Grave,” by Lord Huron talks about how “the reckoning begins.” BOUNDLESS was my reckoning. I took a long, hard look at that yawning grave, and I sprung away. Reckonings can be useful that way. I didn’t know what Chapter Three would be in my life, but I knew I wanted one.

BOUNDLESS has a soundtrack!

In honor of the December 21, 2024, release date, I give you 12 days of songs that tell the story of Living Boundlessly.

Music runs all through the story because I passed on my great musical inheritance to the twins. (And probably the wordsmithing inheritance, too… Grace wrote a play in middle school, and Paul wrote a sci-fi novel in fifth grade.)

Boundless is available!

BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque

BARNES & NOBLE

AMAZON

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