18: One Moment More - Mindy Smith

And from a song with no darkness we now come to one of the most haunting, melancholy, tear-inducing pieces you'll ever hear.

We all face death. And the death of others we love, and how we face that, is so utterly different from how we face our own mortality - should it be? I have no idea - but it's excruciatingly hard to adequately express the pain, the loss, but beyond that those bizarre feelings at those times of being somewhere beyond the now and reaching with the one we love into wherever it is they are going, and going only so far on that road with them before leaving them to continue on alone. How can you explain and describe that feeling, and why do we feel the need to express that, even if we don't want to? Most of us end up in tearful disbelief moving through to slow acceptance and eventually closure, but that path is fraught and varied such that there's never anything the same from one person's experience to the next, and sometimes it doesn't complete even in a lifetime.

And yet, and yet, and yet... Mindy Smith - writing here about her mother's passing - captures in words and music the feelings around these times in a way that is so relatable, so accurate and so beyond anything I could ever hope to express myself. Her vocal performance here is such that you can never imagine anyone else singing it - shades of Sarah McLachlan's performance of Angel up at number 39 - and the lyrics are so clear to hear, so concise and so seeping with emotion that you never want anyone else to sing it.

It's not a song you can listen to often. But it expresses something we need to express, and something that I on my own am totally unable to express in anything like the words, the beauty and the sheer accuracy of what Mindy Smith manages in this song.