Therese (Mom)

Have you ever been driving in your car, cleaning the house, making dinner, or simply going about an ordinary day when a song comes on and suddenly you aren’t where you were five seconds ago?

Maybe you’re sixteen again. Maybe you’re falling in love. Maybe you’re holding your baby. Maybe you’re sitting beside someone who isn’t here anymore. Or maybe you’re remembering a version of yourself you haven’t thought about in years.

That’s what music does to me.

I don’t think I realized until I got older just how much of my life has a soundtrack. Certain songs aren’t simply songs anymore. They’ve become attached to people, places, feelings, and moments. Sometimes all it takes is the first few notes and I’m right back there.

Maybe that’s why I believe music can be its own kind of therapy. It can make us laugh, cry, dance, remember, grieve, pray, and sometimes heal something we didn’t even realize needed healing.

Some Songs Take Me Back

Some songs don’t belong to one particular memory. They belong to an entire era of my life.

Put on Anita Baker and suddenly I’m back in high school. I don’t even need a particular song. It’s her voice. The minute I hear it, I’m transported back to a younger version of myself—the clothes, the hair, the friends, the dreams, the drama…all of it.

And then there’s “Two Occasions” by The Deele. Well, that one gives me all kinds of feelings that are probably better left between me and the song.

That’s the fun of our personal soundtrack. It isn’t made up only of the big moments like weddings, babies, illness, heartbreak, or loss. It’s also crushes, first dates, slow dances, riding around with friends, getting ready to go out, staying out too late, and falling in love—or at least being absolutely convinced we were in love.

Those memories matter too. They remind us that before we became wives, mothers, employees, caregivers, and all the other things life eventually asked us to become, we were just girls trying to figure out who we were.

Sometimes I like being reminded of her.

The Song That Found Me When I Needed It

Then there are songs connected to one very specific moment.

For me, one of those songs is “I’m Free” by Jon Secada.

I had just finished my last chemotherapy session the first time I went through cancer. After months of treatments, appointments, fear, exhaustion, and simply trying to make it through whatever was in front of me, I walked out of that final treatment, got into my car, and started driving away.

And “I’m Free” came on the radio.

Of all the songs that could have played at that exact moment, that was the song. I don’t think I could have chosen a more perfect one if I had tried.

For those few minutes, I didn’t have to think about follow-up appointments or scans. I didn’t have to wonder whether the cancer would return or what the future might hold. I certainly didn’t know that years later I would find myself facing cancer again. At that moment, none of that existed yet.

I had finished chemo. I had made it through something I wasn’t sure I could make it through, and I was driving away listening to a song called “I’m Free.”

Even now, when I hear it, I can go right back to that car. I can feel the relief of that younger woman driving away and believing she had just been given her life back.

Maybe that song found me exactly when I needed it.

The Songs That Belong to My Girls

Then there are the songs that belong to motherhood.

“For Once in My Life” by Stevie Wonder will forever make me think of my oldest daughter. Some songs become so intertwined with a person that eventually you can’t separate the two. You hear the song and you don’t just remember that person—you feel them.

When I think about that song and my daughter, I think about something I never fully understood until I became a mother: unconditional love. For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to love another human being in a way that didn’t depend on anything she could ever do for me. I loved her simply because she was mine.

Then there is “In My Life” by The Beatles.

That song takes me somewhere completely different. I remember standing in the swimming pool holding my youngest daughter, gently swaying her back and forth while I sang to her. Even now, when I hear that song, I can almost feel her little body in my arms.

At the time, it probably felt like just another ordinary moment between a young mother and her baby. I wasn’t thinking, Remember this. Someday you’ll give anything to have this moment back. I was simply living it.

That’s one of the things I understand differently now. We don’t always recognize the important moments while they’re happening. Sometimes music recognizes them for us.

Years later, a song comes on and suddenly the years disappear. A photograph can remind us of something. A song reminds us of what we felt.

And there’s something incredibly powerful about that.

The Songs That Hold the People We’ve Lost

Not every song takes me somewhere happy. Some carry grief too.

“Leader of the Band” by Dan Fogelberg will always remind me of my dad. There is a line in that song about wishing you had said “I love you” more often, and those words hit differently when your dad is no longer here.

After we lose someone, I think many of us wonder the same things: Did they really know? Did I say it enough? Did I show it enough? Did I appreciate the time I had with them?

I would love one more opportunity to tell my dad I love him. It’s not that I didn’t love him enough. I just wish I had told him more.

That’s the strange thing about grief. Eventually we learn how to live alongside it. We work, raise our families, laugh, celebrate birthdays and holidays, and keep moving because life keeps moving. But love doesn’t disappear just because someone is gone, and neither do the memories.

Sometimes a song simply opens the door.

“Leader of the Band” opens that door to my dad. Sometimes it makes me sad. Sometimes it makes me smile. Sometimes it does both at exactly the same time.

Maybe that’s another way music becomes therapy. It gives us permission to miss someone without trying to fix the feeling. And maybe it reminds us to say I love you now—when we’re hanging up the phone, walking out the door, or sitting across from someone we love.

Say it even if you’ve already said it a thousand times.

And Then There’s the Train

As I’ve gotten older, another song has started hitting me differently: “Stop This Train” by John Mayer.

I don’t think I could have fully understood that song when I was twenty. It’s about time moving forward, getting older, watching our parents age, and realizing that no matter how desperately we want to slow everything down, we can’t.

When we’re young, we’re constantly waiting for the next thing. We can’t wait to graduate, get married, have children, buy the house, take the vacation, or reach the next chapter. When our children are little and we’re exhausted, we can’t wait until they’re a little more independent.

And then somewhere along the way, something changes.

Our parents get older. Our children aren’t children anymore. We look in the mirror and occasionally wonder when the woman looking back at us got there. The years that once seemed endless suddenly feel incredibly precious.

I think that’s one of the hardest and most beautiful realizations about getting older. We spend so much of our youth trying to hurry life along, only to reach an age when we’d give almost anything to slow it down.

But we can’t stop the train. Maybe we’re not supposed to.

Maybe we’re supposed to finally look out the window. Maybe we’re supposed to stop waiting for the next destination and appreciate where we are right now, because someday this ordinary Saturday afternoon, dinner with our family, a phone call with someone we love, a conversation with our daughter, or a walk with the dogs may be exactly the moment we wish we could come back to.

The train isn’t going to stop, so maybe the lesson is to stop wishing away the ride.

When Music Becomes Prayer

And then there is another kind of music entirely.

When I’m really feeling like I need a little extra strength, I find myself singing the spiritual songs I’ve sung over and over again at Mass. I don’t necessarily make a conscious decision to do it. The words and melodies are simply there, probably because I’ve sung them so many times over the years that they’ve become part of me.

There are times when I don’t know what to say to God. Sometimes I’m worried, tired, overwhelmed, or afraid. Sometimes I simply need to remind myself that I’m not carrying everything alone.

So I sing.

It might happen quietly in the car, around the house, or sometimes only in my head. Somehow those familiar songs bring me back to a place where I can breathe a little easier and remember to put things in God’s hands.

I’ve sung those songs during ordinary Sundays at Mass and during extraordinary seasons of my life. I’ve sung them when life was good and when life was frightening. I’ve sung them while praying for people I love and during times when I desperately needed prayer myself.

After enough years, they become more than songs. They become prayers I already know by heart.

And sometimes when I can’t find the words myself, the song finds them for me.

Every Part of My Life Has a Song

When I put all of this together, I realize that music has quietly been documenting my life all along.

Youth, love, motherhood, grief, survival, aging, and faith—it’s all there.

Maybe that’s why music feels therapeutic to me. A song can reconnect me with the high school girl I once was, the young mother holding her baby, the daughter missing her dad, the frightened young woman fighting cancer, and the woman I am today trying to appreciate the life she has while accepting how quickly it all moves.

They’re all still part of me.

And maybe that’s something else getting older has taught me. We don’t leave those earlier versions of ourselves behind. We carry them with us. The sixteen-year-old girl is still in there. So is the young mother singing to her baby. So is the daughter who misses her dad. So is the woman who drove away from chemotherapy listening to “I’m Free.”

Music has a way of introducing me to them again.

Maybe that’s the real therapy in music. It doesn’t just remind us where we’ve been. It reconnects us with the different versions of ourselves, the people we’ve loved, the things we’ve survived, and the faith that has carried us along the way.

And sometimes, when life feels particularly heavy, maybe the soul doesn’t need advice at all.

Maybe it just needs the right song.