Ten years since the album 'Carrie & Lowell' - how Sufjan Stevens’ seminal album helped me through the death of my mum, and made me feel less alone

I was surprised to discover that, next month [March 2025], it will be ten years since Sujfan Stevens brought out his beautiful album Carrie & Lowell. This album helped me through the death of my mum, which I wrote about some time ago. I’m sharing the piece below, in case it helps anyone going through a similar thing. Her death also coincided with the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, so it also comes with a trigger warning, in case you were affected by the tragedy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h6gQVxJO9w

Music has always been there for me in my hard times, but never was this more true than when I lost my mother in 2017. Her death coincided eerily with the Manchester Arena bombings. On May 23 2017, the day after a homemade bomb left 23 dead and 800 wounded, nine miles away in an antiseptic-smelling hospital bed in Greater Manchester, my 74-year-old mother closed her eyelids, stopped breathing and, somehow or other, left this world.

Even now this is a mystery I can’t quite fathom. How can something that was so here, just go? She had been suffering with a rare disease of the nervous system called Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) for three years, which, over the last 12 months, had slowly and devastatingly left this vital woman who played the piano, loved walking in the Lake District and revelled in telling funny stories, unable to walk, speak or barely eat, dependant on my dad, my sister and myself for her every move My grief was overwhelming and debilitating.

In the days and weeks that followed, I felt as if I was living in a dream; I went to sleep holding her cardigans. I spoke to her as I was working and cleaning the house. I even went to medium nights… just in case.

Music, as always, took on a special significance. Somehow, random lyrics would hold the key to my emotions and my grief would fly open like a terrible, dark bird. In the same way that having babies made suddenly every love song in the world make total sense, I only truly understood heartbreak through losing my mum. Certain songs took on an unbearable poignancy. Often they were the ones I least expected: not the bands I grew up with or thought were cool. Instead, there were surprises. ‘Only You’ by Yazoo bursting through a car radio made me pull into a lay-by and burst into tears. (‘Looking from a window above, it's like a story of love/ Can you hear me?). Taylor Swift’s ‘Breathe’ (‘And I can’t breathe without you/ but I have to”) described all those days, hours and moments of wanting to cry, of wanting to just climb back into bed, but having to carry on and be the mother you have just lost… get the kids ready for school, make the breakfast, go to work, pick them up and fix on a bright smile... when all you want to do is stop. Stop living. Stop breathing. Just stop.

But, of all the songs out there, the one that helped me most was ‘Carrie & Lowell’ by Sufjan Stevens. Steeped in grief, drenched in mourning, the 11-song album released two years earlier is a dark, febrile masterpiece of loss, pain, confusion, and the deep excavation work that comes with losing someone you deeply love.

Stevens wrote it in what he describes as ‘a year of real darkness’. How strange for me that, in my own year of real darkness, it was to be the salve and light I was so seeking. From the moment I first heard it, the words ‘Spirit of my silence, I can hear you’ ringing out so clearly and plainly in that chilled empty room, something in the lyrics grabbed at my heart and wouldn’t let go. I played it compulsively. This is where you are. This is how you feel. There was that sweetness, that relief in having my own feelings witnessed, played back to me, shared – that sense that someone else had felt what I was feeling, someone else had felt this strange haunting: the way those intimate personal stories take on an unbearable intensity, as you ponder the greatest unponderable: Where did they go?

Stevens’ album was the only music I knew that captured this haunting other presence I felt around me all the time: the whisper of her in every left fragment; tissues crumpled in pockets; a lip balm by the sink; a postcard she once sent me showing exactly the same spot on the Isle of Ghia where we would later scatter her ashes.

Stevens knew too of this strange hinterland between physicality and the ephemeral, the sense that their spirit is still all around, disputing their physical departure. He speaks of 'the kiss on my cheek', 'the amethysts on the table', how the material markers persist, but always this reaching for the otherworldly: ‘the dragonfly’, ‘the firefly’; ‘my fossil is bright in the sun’.

Difficult to listen to for some, the album soothed me through the difficult days and months that followed, as I tried to untangle my grief as Stevens tried to untangle his own complicated feelings of loss – for a mother who had abandoned him as a one-year-old baby, and left him at ‘three or four’ at ‘a video store’.

Some part of me was lost in your sleeves where you hid your cigarettes,’ he tells us, about his early experiences around his mother as a small child.

Some part of us inevitably gets lost whenever we lose someone; yet Stevens’ music was a way back for me to climb out of a deep dark hole and start living again. It is also, of course, just a very lovely album, which you can listen to whatever your mood – just to enjoy the nice songs.

Written for my February 2025 Substack 'A Warm Bath... and Bubbles'.