Becca and I sat next to a woman at a Sara Bareilles concert in Boston recently. We weren’t supposed to. Or were we?
We had tickets to the first night of Sara Bareilles’s Good Grief tour. Some friends of ours were going too. Then life happened to them and they couldn’t use the tickets. Their seats were better. So, we sold ours and bought theirs.
It was an ordinary decision. I think it led to an extraordinary story.
Our new tickets were VIP, which meant early entry and a little gift bag.
They started checking people in while we stood in line to enter the venue. They needed the name of the person who originally bought the tickets to check us in. Jason’s name wasn’t coming up. We tried his husband’s name. Nope.
The woman doing the check-in said our tickets were fine, but that she needed the name of the original purchaser to finalize the process. I told her we didn’t need to do the VIP thing. I didn’t want her getting in trouble over it.
She gave us our wristbands and asked if we could try to find the name. She moved on to the rest of the line and didn’t come back to us.
When we walked into the venue, she was at a table handing out the VIP gift bags. I looked at her with a look of, are we okay? She nodded in affirmation and handed us the bags.
Inside the bags were a few things including a concert poster.
We walked around the lobby for a while and watched the merchandise line get longer and longer. One of the benefits of early entry was early access to merch.
We eventually made our way to our seats. We chatted a bit with a couple of women on my left. Becca sat on my right, and the seat beside her stayed empty for a while.
Shortly before the concert was scheduled to start, 8pm, I went out to go to the bathroom. The only men’s room was on the second floor. As I walked up the stairs, I was a bit amazed at how long the merch line had gotten. It was up the stairs and wrapped around the second-floor lobby. I now understood the benefit of the early access to the merch.
I got back to our seats and the empty seat next to Becca had been taken by a woman about our age. Sara was late coming on, so it gave us some time to chat with her.
Within about 2 minutes she shared with us that her husband died in January.
She has 5 kids. The youngest is 7. The oldest is 18. She’s a doctor, and her specialty is fertility, which is its own strange coincidence given some of what’s on Sara’s new album. She has a serious job, 5 kids, and no husband and she is, in her words, still trying to figure this out.
She told us the album had been a big part of getting through the last 8 months. She said it had been so helpful in her grieving process.
I want to say something about that. We had known this woman for 2 minutes at most. And the conversation went straight to the hardest thing in her life before we’d even exchanged first names.
That doesn’t happen at most concerts.
Then she mentioned the merch line. How long it was. She wanted a poster. She and her husband had a wall in their house. Every show they went to, they framed the poster and hung it up.
In that moment, I realized that life had handed me an amazing gift.
I think I stopped talking mid-sentence and reached down under my seat. Becca said, “I know exactly what my husband is doing.”
I grabbed the poster and handed it to her.
She asked if I was serious. I explained the whole thing. Jason couldn’t go, we ended up with 2 VIP packages, we don’t need 2 posters, and honestly, I’m not sure we need 1.
Here’s why I think this is the making of an extraordinary story.
Jason and his husband had something come up and couldn’t use their tickets. We sold ours and bought theirs, because the seats were better. Then a woman at a check-in table decided not to turn a missing name into a problem and handed us VIP gift bags which included a poster.
That’s the chain. Three small decisions, none of them seemingly connected. And not one of them was aimed at a widow who wanted a poster for her wall. But the story doesn’t end there.
Soon after, the lights went down and Sara came out.
The first set was mostly songs from the new album, roughly played in order. 14 songs in the set, with 3 songs not on the new album. One of them was Gravity.
It’s one of her older ones. She wrote it when she was 18 and it’s about wanting to be released from the gravity of someone’s love. It’s a heart-wrenching song. As Sara sang the words:
You hold me without touch
You keep me without chains
I never wanted anything so much
Than to drown in your love and not feel your rain
Set me free, leave me be
I don’t wanna fall another moment into your gravity
I could see the woman next to Becca starting to cry. And it moved down the line. It went to Becca, and then it came to me. The 3 of us sat in a row in a dark theater with tears running down our faces and not one word said between us. But I think we knew what we were feeling.
Then she reached over and offered Becca a tissue.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot.
A woman who lost her husband 8 months ago is crying to a song about wanting to be let go from someone’s love. And her instinct, in the middle of it, is to take care of the person crying next to her. I think that is beautiful!
After Gravity, Sara played Forever. It’s a song about being there with someone while they die. She wrote it about losing a close friend.
So, the first set closed with a song about bearing witness to grief. Right after 3 strangers had just done it together.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about.
Rob Reider talked about grief needing a witness in our Campfire Conversation.1 And I’ve repeated it plenty of times since. It sounds like it’s about the person grieving.
But I think it is so much more than that. Grief needing a witness is a relationship thing, and it goes both ways. And being that witness is harder than it sounds.
Because when somebody you’re sitting with is in real pain, everything in you wants to do something about it. Fix it. Lighten it. Find the sentence that helps. We are not comfortable watching someone hurt, so we reach for the exit, and we call it kindness.
The actual work is to stay there. Feel it with them. Offer nothing. Let them be seen having it.
I’m not saying that’s harder than grieving. But it’s a skill almost nobody teaches us, and it’s the reason a lot of people end up grieving alone in a room while people who love them are 20 feet away trying to cheer them up.
One more thing about that night.
Sara left a few thousand people somewhere deep, and she knew it. When she came back out for the first encore, she had a problem to solve. She needed to show people there is a light at the end of the tunnel of grief.
And she did it in a completely unexpected yet so obvious way. She instantly lifted everyone up by covering I Wanna Dance with Somebody by Whitney Houston.
If there’s one song that can get people up on their feet dancing, that is probably it.
Now back to the poster. Here’s what I think about it.
Giving it to her wasn’t extraordinary. It cost me nothing. I had 2 and I needed 0.
But a handful of ordinary decisions, made by people who weren’t thinking about doing anything extraordinary, added up to something I think might be extraordinary.
We will almost certainly never see her again. The odds are close to zero.
But there is a wall in a house in Quincy, MA with a poster on it that wasn’t going to be there. And when she looks at it, she’ll think about her husband, and about a concert in Boston, and about 2 people she cried with and never saw again.
It’s made me think about what extraordinary actually is. I don’t think it is one big thing. Rather it might be a collection of ordinary things that happen to land in the same place.
It makes me think about how many times I may have decided not to do the ordinary thing, because it didn’t seem like it would matter much.
What if we all started doing more random acts of ordinary. We probably won’t get to see where the ripples go. But remember, small ripples that travel thousands of miles are what turn into epic waves.
This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.
Grief Needs a Witness: A Campfire Conversation with Rob Reider
The night before Rob Reider lost his daughter, he had a dream. He rarely remembers his dreams. But he remembered this one.