Elton John and Kiki Dee

The CD player in my car is old and broken, and the only way I can listen to music in my car is on the radio; all I could tolerate was 70s classic rock, pop and disco, which I blasted on my way home tonight after an intense day at work. There’s something so sublime about the random radio tune that I haven’t thought of in years, decades even, a song so cheesy and evocative of an era, a song so bad that it can only be appreciated, beyond irony, after a weekend of caring for a woman who’s had so much pain she had to be palliatively sedated and is actively dying and having seizures all day, hands, feet and mouth turning purple, and spending hours talking with a man unable to accept that he can no longer get out of bed and helping him try many times so he can feel for himself his new limitation, feeling his body shaking and unbalanced, feeling his frustration and despair and denial, and listening to the Threshold Choir sing achingly tender songs to a dying woman and her family, and tending to the other residents in their own mortal processes, and all the running up and down stairs, and my toes cramping from being on my feet all weekend… and then this song on the radio, me belting out more lyrics than I knew that I knew of this ridiculous song, and then the ecstasy of the release of the human dramas of the weekend, letting them go with each simplistic lyric I sing out in my raw and slightly off-key voice as I am stuck in traffic on the bridge, the fog in shifting shades of rose and gray being overtaken by the rising dark of night, feeling the gratitude to be of service to people in these harrowing final moments, feeling the beauty and grief and joy and love and acceptance of the full cycle of life - singing this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0qW9P-uYfM