A Return to Music: Glass Beams, September 2024; Nick Cave May, 2025

In the fall of 2024, I was at a Glass Beams show at Mission Ballroom in Denver. I had been exhausted and deeply burned out by my job. I didn't know what to do to help myself. I could feel myself circling the drain, and I knew I wasn't able to do this job anymore. I knew I was headed for disaster, I had no idea what that looked like at the time. I knew I needed to do more "fun things" to try to turn the ship around. Truthfully, I dreaded that question, "What do you do for fun"? I began to resent it when anyone asked me that. I would think, "I lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, feel tears run down the corners of my eyes, and try not to think about how close I am to total collapse. ", but that's not what I would say. I could always rely on the usual in Colorado, "I like to hike". I could feel my soul draining from my body every time. Anyway, I was at this show at the end of September to try to feel human again. It was good. They were great. I felt sort of normal.

I booked a hotel that night so I didn't have to drive back. I got to bed late, and at about 6:00 am, I got a call from my long-time ex-partner, Gracen. I remember looking at their name on the screen and thinking, "I'm so tired." I decided to answer, and my life changed. They were hysterical, crying. They said, "I'm not ok. I'm so sorry. I keep making terrible decisions. I'm so sorry. Please call a wellness check." I told them it's ok, that I love them, and we can deal with any bad decisions. Gracen was living in Santa Fe at the time. We had been separated for a couple of years but stayed in close contact. I asked for the address, hung up, and called in a wellness check. The dispatcher said there had already been a call, and officers were on the way. Thirty minutes later my ex-partner was dead. The police shot them three times in the chest. We had shared a life for over a decade. We were apart for a few years, and then they were dead. Later, they released body cam footage that I never watched.

I didn't know. I went back to sleep for about an hour and a half and then got up to drive directly to work. I sent texts asking for a message or a call ASAP so I would know what was going on. Wellness checks were not a new thing. I wasn't alarmed by that. I wasn't alarmed when it looked like Gracen's phone was dead; that happened often. I started getting alarmed on the two-hour drive back up to the mountains. I could feel in my bones that something was wrong. We were together for almost 10 years. I had an energetic line on them. I started calling psych units and looking at police records for arrests (not the best idea while driving on I-70). I got to work with no information. I'm a psychotherapist, and I was working in residential treatment. I had group that morning, and during the break I got a phone call. It was from Gracen's sister, Heidi.

"She's dead." My ex was transitioning F2M, so the pronoun threw me. I thought she was talking about Gracen's on-again, off-again girlfriend. I wasn't really comprehending.

"I've been calling hospitals and looking at arrest records. I can't find them, but it will be ok."

Heidi repeated, "No, she's fucking dead. They shot her." I was trying to make sense in my head.

"It's ok, we talked this morning."

"No, Lana. Gracen's dead. They're Dead." Heidi's voice was breaking. I sank to the floor.

All I remember after that was messaging a co-worker to tell them what happened. The rest was a blur. My co-worker drove me home. Someone else drove my car. My boss told me to "take all the time I need." I felt half-real, half-alive. Two days later, I got in the car with my dogs and drove down to Florida to see my family. I grieved heavily for months. Three weeks after the death, I had to leave my job.

I couldn't do my job anymore; I knew that, and so did they. I was burned before I lost Gracen. After that, I was a ghost.

I will never forget that Glass Beams concert.

On the road down to Florida, I listened to music. I felt safe in the car with my dogs, because I was nowhere. I felt safe being nowhere. I cried, and I leaned on the music to get me home. I had stopped listening to music like I used to during my downward spiral (Yes, a nod to Trent Reznor). After Gracen died, and then after I lost my job, it was the one thing I could reconnect to. The only thing. It was a lifeline.

It just so happened that northern Florida was getting devastated by a strong category four hurricane as I was on the way there. I'm from that state, I know storms. So I stopped in New Orleans for a night. Let me tell you something, that city knows how to hold grief.

I got the dogs settled in the hotel, and I went outside in downtown New Orleans and I sat on the stoop, in my harem pants, dirty flip flops, and a coffee-stained shirt. I felt like a void. I watched the people that night, just living their lives. I remember thinking that I understood why there was a tradition of wearing a black veil when in a grief process. I felt like my life wasn't happening in the normal way anymore, and I couldn't explain it, like I was stuck in an in-between with Gracen.

In the first four days after their death, I could feel them in my chest. I felt their soul come to the safest place they had ever known, in my body. I felt this agonizing pull and push of confused energy trying to find its way home, for four days. I know that this was my person, fighting with having been ripped from their life in a split second and trying to understand that they didn't need me anymore; that they weren't alive anymore. I was in New Orleans on the fourth day.

I started walking alone. I was directed to Frenchman Street. I wandered in and out of clubs with live music. At one club, the doorman looked at me and said, "You look like you need a friend." I just stood there, dirty and broken. He said, "Go in. Don't pay me the cover, go in and make friends."

I walked up to the stage and watched the band. I had been crying for so long, I barely noticed the tears trailing down my face. One of the men on the side of the stage saw me. He asked what was wrong. I told him I just lost one of the closest people in my life, and I could feel them pulling out of my chest. He didn't say anything. He touched his chest and then pulled me in. He pulled me behind the gate of the stage and held me for longer than you do when you hug a stranger. He knew. New Orleans knows. It felt like I was connected to the grief of the centuries in that city, at that moment. These last two photographs are from that stage.

New Orleans held me, the music held me, and that night I felt understood.

About a year before this, I learned that Chris Cornell had committed suicide, by hanging, after a show on tour in 2017. I stumbled on a live version of When I'm Down on YouTube, and I read about his death in the comments. When I'm Down is a devastatingly beautiful song. I was moved to tears just hearing it. So when I read that he took his life, it hit me hard. I poured through his solo career catalog. I heard When Hope and Promise Fade, Bend in the Road, and Higher Truth and I died a little bit with him.

I listened to grunge, industrial, and alternative in the '90s, so I was familiar with losing music heroes. I remember listening to Courtney Love read Kurt Cobain's suicide note live on MTV. I was fourteen at the time. My formative years included the reality of mental health struggles and death, not only from commercial music but also in my family. I grew up in a family of gigging musicians, and they were not without the accompanying sex and drugs, but that story is for another blog.

I had Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell as the survivors of that era. It was comforting somehow, I realized, even into adulthood after not listening to that music for years. I learned this when Chris's death knocked the air out of me. So when I was in grief last winter, I was thinking a lot about him, the trials of my family of origin, Gracen, and how so much stigma still exists in the music industry. That winter was cold and long.

When spring came, I went to see Nick Cave at Mission. That was the first time I did the two-hour (one-way) drive down and back from Denver in one night. It wasn't that bad, and I remember this fire in my gut saying it's worth it, every time, it's worth it. I had been thinking about how to start helping break the stigma in the music industry and support artists and crew accessing care. I connected with organizations like Backline and Amber Health, among others, who are doing great work. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I wanted to be on the ground, at venues, to make an impact. So I said "fuck it" and started printing T-shirts to normalize mental health support in music and bringing them to shows. A one-woman, guerrilla-style operation to get the word out. I put a QR code on the back that links to a list of resources for on-the-spot help and started my mission. Beyond 27 was born.