Mourning with Musical Media

Over the course of two years, from January 2021 until January 2023, Dr Patrick E. McNabb suffered a series of personal losses that included the deaths of multiple close family members. To help cope, Patrick turned to media to help him process his grief, particularly music and associated video-formatted interpretations of that music. It is a time-honored tradition exemplified by such modern communal mourning classics as Elton John&s;s “Candle in the Wind”/ “Goodbye England&s;s Rose,” and Alan Jackson&s;s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).” That, and Patrick&s;s academic specialty is media psychology, the applied study of how humans use and are affected by media. In the following chapter, Dr McNabb relates how he mourned with the aid of three musical compositions and some of their video manifestations/interpretations: Boyz II Men&s;s “It&s;s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” Samuel Barber&s;s “Adagio for Strings” (particularly as it was featured in Oliver Stone&s;s Platoon ), and Jay Ungar and Molly Mason&s;s “Ashokan Farewell,” popularized in Ken Burns&s;s documentary The Civil War . Along the way, Patrick describes each piece, its context for him, and how he used and still uses it as part of his efforts to cope with his losses and to continue to move forward. To help describe the mechanisms of the music and other technical aspects, Patrick includes input from his wife, Amethyst, who, in addition to having lived through these traumas with Patrick, is a former professional multi-instrumentalist musician with specific training in playing for the dying.