All We Love We Leave Behind

As a scene, we’ve placed a lot of attention on teaching ourselves to live. Hardcore is only just starting to learn how to talk about death.

That’s me, on Chris’s shoulders, with his brother Heath in 1989. It’s the only picture I have of us together.

I.

Over the years, I’ve told several different versions of this story. When you’re handling loss, there are always several stories to tell.

I will always remember that day in 1988 when I first met Chris. He had just started dating a girl I was friends with and he was waiting in the parking lot of my high school to pick her up. Back then, any time you met someone with even a passing interest in hardcore, it was a given that you’d become fast friends, and by the time he pulled out of that parking lot, I knew we’d crossed that threshold. Within months, Chris and I became so close that he started coming over to my house every weeknight after his girlfriend’s curfew. We’d hang out in my room, listening to music and listening to each other talk about our lives until my mom would kick him out—most nights not until well after midnight. I remember going to shows with him, on Long Island or at CBGB, and I specifically remember how much we loved Murphy’s Law. In 1988, Murphy’s Law was the band that most straightedge kids (me) and non-straightedge kids (him) could agree on. If I told you I saw them play at least thirty times in the tri-state area before 1990, I wouldn’t be exaggerating.

There is one memory, though, that I cherish more than any other. It was on Thanksgiving Day in 1989. My family never properly celebrated Thanksgiving—or any holiday, for some reason—so I was feeling particularly left out. All of my friends had plans, and Chris was actually obligated to attend two Thanksgiving dinners that night: one with his family, and one with his girlfriend’s family. These gatherings would go late into the night, so he told me he wouldn’t be able to come over like he usually did. That was OK, I told him. And it was. There had also been a snowstorm that day—severe enough to have disrupted the Thanksgiving Day Parade—and I didn’t want or expect him to plow through the snow any more than he had to.

But then, just before midnight, I heard a knock at the door. It was Chris, bundled up in several layers of winter clothes, standing in the snow with his van idling in the driveway.

“I couldn’t let you spend Thanksgiving alone,” he said. “You wanna go for a ride?”

I grabbed my coat and left the house, eager to take shotgun. We drove across all of Long Island that night, aimlessly, with no place to go and no place to be. We talked, we laughed, we sat in silence enjoying the sound of the wheels brushing against the snow and the mere presence of being with one another. Sometime after sunrise, we drove back to his house and passed out in his room. Lying on his bedroom floor that morning, I felt safe.

Before meeting Chris, I had never felt that kind of selflessness and unconditional love from anyone. When he died unexpectedly in a car accident on May 1, 1990, I was absolutely fucking destroyed.

II.

There will be a temptation to wonder why Death is Nothing To Us—the new album from Fiddlehead, out this Friday—is set to become the third consecutive record by the band to thematically work through the untimely death of LTC Richard Flynn and the grief of his son, Pat. Never before has a hardcore band, or really any band, taken on such a specific experience with this kind of an extended focus; even our closest analog—Touché Amoré’s Stage Four, the 2016 tribute to singer Jeremy Bolm’s late mother—was a one-shot deal. It’s possible that some of the reason for this is our tendency to cling onto the so-called conventional wisdom that suggests there is somehow an appropriate length of time for a “grieving period,” that there is such a thing as grieving “too long.” That cause for concern is real. But the idea that Pat Flynn could dedicate an entire trilogy to the experience of losing his father in the way he’s been doing it only underscores the fact that grief is not a linear process, with a discrete beginning and a consummate closure, but a messy and recursive operation that takes new shapes with time. “Moving on” doesn’t—nor should it—look the same for everyone.

When I sat down with Pat for a conversation, to be published in full on Thursday, I asked him if he ever worried that writing so much about this topic could eventually desensitize him from feelings he still needs to have.

“I don’t think so, no,” he told me. “Because, for me, there’s just an eternal longing for my father. It will never go away. I saw some random video of Billy Bob Thornton saying, ‘I've never been the same since my brother died. I will never be the same’—and I understand that. A desensitization towards death and loss, to me, speaks to an unhealthy way of dealing with it. But what I’ve really tried to do is look at death and loss as a part of the life experience and really welcome it into the daily conversation so that it’s not weird. In the first few years after my father died, I remember feeling weird talking about him in the presence of my friends, and then feeling weird about feeling weird. I really want to rip that part out of it.”

What Pat and Fiddlehead have been doing over three albums, then, is not simply expressing grief, but mining the varied contours of that experience through introspection, empathy, the arc of time, and even the prism of social expectation. Pat is exploring death as a living thing. And by writing a new record that once again centers these themes, he is challenging us to experience our own grief fully—without a stopwatch or a style guide.

Before Stage Four, examples of what I’d call “grief work” in punk and hardcore have been few and far between. Since the Descendents’ “Jean is Dead” in 1982, there have certainly been any number of “now you’re gone!” songs added to the canon, but in terms of songs that actually move deeper into the aftermath of loss in some way without getting too abstract, they truly run the gamut: From Marginal Man’s “Forever Gone” and Samiam’s “Dull” to “Dead Friend” by Against Me! and Converge’s “All We Love We Leave Behind,” hardcore has moved through death with sadness and regret, but very rarely with the benefit of distance.

Which is the other unique—and particularly valuable—aspect of Fiddlehead’s grief work: LTC Richard Flynn passed away in 2010. Whereas most of these other songs are asking the hypothetical what will I do without you?, Pat Flynn is writing to us from the future actually answering the question.

III.

Not long after Chris died, I dropped out of high school, sold everything I owned, and became a Hare Krishna monk. This was not a coincidence; it was an acting out. I struggled with having a reason to live without him, so I went out and found one. Nothing I owned gave me any consolation, so I got rid of it all. I became obsessed with death and what happens to you after death. I craved certainty in an area of life that can never give you any certainty. Whether or not what I believed was true was besides the point. I only needed to feel like I knew what happened at death. It was comforting, until it wasn’t.

Enough time has passed for me to be able to say that had it not been for Chris dying, I would never have joined any band and you would not be reading this. I know this because I had no serious aspirations to make music or “become a writer” when I was in high school. It wasn’t until I realized that my grief wasn’t going to simply subside that I picked up a guitar again. It wasn’t until I went on my first tour in 1992—playing for Ressurection on a two-month cross-country trip with Lifetime—that I realized this was the kind of life Chris would have wanted me to have. That famous aphorism about how “grief is just love with no place to go” is true. I put that love into playing guitar and writing, and I still think about Chris when I’m doing it. Grief can look like this, too.

There’s another story I’ve told several different versions of, but never with this ending.

The last time I spoke with my mother was in the summer of 2004. By the end of that year, when it became clear that my family had effectively disowned me—coming out to her, apparently, had been the final straw—I started the months-long process of having my name legally changed. My family name had only caused me pain, so the plan to replace my surname was a given. But my parents had also never given me a middle name. I decided that I would give myself one of those, too.

When my updated birth certificate finally arrived in the mail, I actually cried. The envelope was addressed to Norman Christopher Brannon.

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Pat Flynn of Fiddlehead.

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