Death and Dying

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      How Anderson Cooper Deals With Grief and Memorializes His Family at Home

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      How do you memorialize the people you loved and lost? Object by object, the CNN anchor is trying to figure it out.It took Anderson Cooper more than a year after his mother’s death to begin clearing out her apartment. It was an emotionally draining task, one that he put off — something his mother may have anticipated, because she left him a road map.He began finding notes she had left him, tucked away in drawers and sealed containers. Written in her hand on heavy stationery, they acted as a kind of treasure hunt to their shared grief.Mr. Cooper’s mother, the heiress and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, was one of the most famous women in the world, courted by Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, photographed by Richard Avedon, and a muse to Truman Capote, who is believed to have based the character of Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” partly on her.Just sorting through her personal papers would have been challenging for her son after her death at the age of 95 in 2019.But the apartment was also the final resting place of objects that belonged to Mr. Cooper’s father, Wyatt Emory Cooper, an author and screenwriter who died in 1978 when Anderson was 10, and his older brother, Carter Cooper, who died in 1988, when they were both in their 20s, after jumping from his mother’s balcony.Next to a pair of satin trousers, Mr. Cooper came across a piece of paper: “These are Daddy’s pyjamas.”“Daddy’s glasses,” read another, left on top of a stack of spectacles tied with a ribbon.And then, tucked away in a plastic container, he found a white silk shirt next to a knitted skirt. “Blouse and skirt I was wearing when Carter died,” read the sheet of paper lying on top.Anderson Cooper, 56Occupation: CNN anchor, author and podcast hostOn processing the past: “I’m the last one left from this sort of interesting family that existed,” he said. “I just find it sort of haunting this idea that everyone just disappears.”When a person you love dies, you are left with memories, a mental film reel of the experiences you shared, the lessons they taught you and the refracted light of their love. And at the most basic level, you are also left with their stuff — often more stuff than you can keep.Among the notes Anderson Cooper found when he went to clean out his mother’s apartment was this one, left on top of a stack of glasses that had belonged to his father.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMr. Cooper, 56, began keeping voice memos on his phone as he was sorting through his mother’s belongings in 2021. They grew into a podcast on grief, “All There Is With Anderson Cooper,” which began its second season in November.For decades, the longtime anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” has chronicled other people’s suffering. Now, he has become a correspondent from the land of his own grief.He recently invited a reporter to his Manhattan home, in Greenwich Village, where he has displayed some of the objects he retrieved from his mother’s apartment on the Upper East Side.Ms. Vanderbilt, whose fashion designs were the subject of numerous magazine features, was fond of saying that “decorating is autobiography.” For her son, decorating has also been an exercise in choosing what to remember.The doors of his home — a historic firehouse he bought for $4.3 million in 2009 — open onto the space where the fire truck once stood. When he bought the building, there was one way to get upstairs — a steel spiral staircase — and two ways to get back down: that narrow staircase or a fireman’s pole.The cherry-red spiral staircase was initially the only way to get upstairs in the former firehouse. Mr. Cooper preserved it, but added another staircase.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesA living room bookcase is filled with antique books, including some that belonged to Mr. Cooper’s mother, his father and his Vanderbilt ancestors.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMr. Cooper worked with an architect to subdivide the four-story, warehouselike space into rooms. Both the spiral staircase and the fireman’s pole were preserved. But now, a wide staircase zigzags upstairs. The wall next to the main staircase serves as a gallery of his mother’s paintings, as well as portraits of her signed by well-known photographers.It’s a celebration of Ms. Vanderbilt’s much-publicized life: At the age of 10, she became a tabloid sensation after a custody battle pitted her wealthy mother against her wealthy aunt. As the heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune, she inherited millions. But she was also a self-made woman, creating a line of jeans and a fashion empire that generated $100 million a year in revenue. She was married four times and had affairs with some of Hollywood’s leading men, including Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, who sent her adoring telegrams signed “The Feller on the White Horse.” She also wrote numerous books and painted prolifically, in a faux-naïf style.To the casual observer, there are only happy memories of her in Mr. Cooper’s home — of her legendary beauty, her talent and her connections to the famous people of her day.In the basement of the firehouse, Mr. Cooper is working his way through the last 70 or so boxes of his mother’s belongings. Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut laced throughout are also hints of grief: On a side table is a Victorian calendar, made of intricately fashioned bronze, with three little windows for a day, date and month. “Friday,” says the first window. “22,” says the second. “July,” says the third.Mr. Cooper found the calendar on a shelf next to his mother’s bed. Then he realized what the date referred to: It was on July 22, 1988, that his brother jumped off the balcony of their mother’s 14-story apartment building, as she pleaded with him not to.After her son died, Ms. Vanderbilt moved multiple times, and the calendar went with her. But its dial never moved again, forever marking the moment of tragedy. “I was getting rid of my mom’s apartment, and I just didn’t want to let go of everything,” said Mr. Cooper, who now displays the calendar in his living room.It was three years after his brother’s death, in 1991, that Mr. Cooper discovered war reporting: After graduating from Yale University, he worked briefly as a fact checker for Channel One, a daily news program broadcast to schools. He lasted mere months before convincing a colleague to make him a fake press pass and loan him a Hi8 camcorder. In late 1991, he sneaked into Myanmar, where insurgents were fighting to overthrow the military dictatorship and sold his first TV story.The Victorian calendar that Mr. Cooper found near his mother’s bed, which still shows the day of his brother’s death: July 22, 1988.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn 1992, he covered famine in Somalia. In 1993, Sarajevo. In 1994, he crossed a bridge into Rwanda. When he looked down, he saw bodies caught on the rocks, their arms flailing in the water. It was at the edges of the world, in places of extreme suffering, that he discovered he could feel again, he said.When he was 10 and his mother came to tell him that his father had died of a heart attack, he remembers crying — a little, he said. And then almost never again.He pulled inward, learning to control his emotions, he said. Among his earliest impulses was the desire to be fully independent. One of his first appearances in the pages of this newspaper was in a story about a lemonade stand he helped run. He got his own bank account, and after his father’s death, he began working as a child model for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.He retreated even further after his brother’s death, when Mr. Cooper was 21.Tracing two lines in the air, he said: “I sort of live in this middle ground of no high highs and no low lows.”He continued: “The only time I felt stuff is when things were so extreme that you couldn’t help but feel — where it was so overwhelming, terrifying, tragic that through, like, osmosis, it overcame all of the sort of things I had worked up to prevent myself from feeling,”But it was a fleeting solution. “I would come back home,” he said, “and I just felt dead.”The death of his mother and the subsequent birth of his sons — who are now 3 and almost 2 — made him take stock. (Mr. Cooper is co-parenting his children with his former partner, Benjamin Maisani, 50, an entrepreneur and nightclub owner.) He described the sadness that he used to see in his mother’s eyes. He doesn’t want his sons to see that in him.Photographs of Carter Cooper, Mr. Cooper’s brother who died when they were in their 20s.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBy now, he is down to the last 70 or so boxes of his mother’s belongings. Unpacking them has meant unboxing the real estate in his mind.A few months ago, he was in the basement of his townhouse, working his way through the containers, when he opened a box of his father’s papers and discovered an essay his father, who died of a heart attack at 50, had never published. Its title: “The importance of grieving.”Among Mr. Cooper’s earliest memories is of falling asleep curled up like a puppy on his father’s lap, while his father typed late into the night.Alone in the basement, Mr. Cooper began to read the essay. A few pages in was a description of what happens to a child who doesn’t grieve: “When a person is unable to complete a mourning task in childhood, he either has to surrender his emotions in order that they do not suddenly overwhelm him, or else he may be haunted constantly throughout his life with a sadness for which he cannot find an appropriate explanation.”Mr. Cooper stopped midsentence, taking off his glasses. For several seconds, he was silent.“I read this quote and I realized,” he said finally, his voice breaking, that “this is exactly what I’ve done.”Last year, he invited his podcast listeners to share their stories of loss. The hotline he created filled up with more than 46 hours of voice mail messages. Listening in his basement, alone, as he unpacked his mother’s boxes, he was overwhelmed.He has arrived at a new stage of grief, he said. He now feels “a welling,” he said, “that is underneath me at all times.”Mr. Cooper shows off the gallery of his mother’s paintings and photos that he created in the stairwell of his townhouse.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesAnd for once, he is feeling it in the city where he was born, mere miles from the Upper East Side, where his father and brother both died too young. He is feeling it without needing to go to a foreign country.“Here,” he said, “just in regular conversations with people.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      Somewhat Guiltily, Ukrainians Miss Matthew Perry

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      Even as the war’s devastation rages on, Ukrainians have found space to mourn an actor who brought them comfort and laughter.It was the middle of the night in Ukraine, and Natalia Sosnytska couldn’t sleep. So she opened the Instagram app on her phone — and saw that the actor Matthew Perry had died.She broke down in tears, she said, then immediately felt embarrassed.“We need to remember those dying here in Ukraine daily, but maybe also those who inspire us,” she said, trying to come to terms with her layered emotions.She was hardly alone. Mr. Perry’s death last Saturday resonated with the many Ukrainians who had watched “Friends,” which was shown on broadcast television in the country and was popular especially with younger people.On the day that Mr. Perry’s death was reported by Ukraine’s mainstream news outlets and discussed on social media, the news in Ukraine was difficult, as usual: Russia had bombed the southern city of Kherson, and nine Ukrainian civilians, including children, had been found shot to death in the occupied town of Volnovakha. Yet Ukrainians found space in their hearts for sadness about the death of an actor who had touched their lives.“It is almost the same age as Ukrainian independence,” Maryna Synhaivska, the deputy director of the Ukrinform news agency, said of “Friends,” which began in 1994, three years after Ukraine split from the Soviet Union.“I was growing up with him, same as many Ukrainians,” Ms. Synhaivska said of Mr. Perry and Chandler Bing, his character on the show. “I am senselessly saddened by this news, and I can say that tens of thousands of people read it.”The series’ success in Ukraine was partly down to the high quality of its translation. It was dubbed into Ukrainian rather than Russian, and linguists have highlighted how well its American slang was rendered. Ukrainian viewers were also able to watch each new episode almost at the same time as viewers in the United States.Ms. Sosnytska, who is 32, named a community center that she opened in 2017 for young people in her hometown, Kostiantynivka, in eastern Ukraine, after the show.The space was intended to be a place where like-minded people could get together and have fun, but they struggled to settle on a name they all liked. She had watched every season of “Friends” no less than 10 times, she said, and her friends liked it, too. So they called the center Druzi — “friends” in Ukrainian — and the sign on the building mimicked the show’s title font.The community center Druzi before the full scale invasion in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine.via Natalia SosnytskaThese days, the city is near the front line, where life is highly dangerous, and the community center sits empty, surrounded by bomb craters.Ms. Sosnytska said that when she heard the news of Mr. Perry’s death, “I understood that I just need to watch one more time.”The series has been a source of solace for some Ukrainian fans during the many months of war.Anastasiya Nigmatulina, 28, a beautician in Vinnytsia, a city in central Ukraine, said she had watched the show over and over since the war started. “It helps me to feel better,” she said.Her husband is a soldier, and she worries about him often. He is home on leave now with her and their 5-year-old daughter, but will return to the front soon. There were many times when Ms. Nigmatulina “felt scared and stressed, but this series supported me,” she said.“And particularly Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry,” she added. “I feel like I lost a close friend.”“Friends” also helped some in the country learn Ukrainian, just as it has aided people around the world in learning English.“I talk and hear how I am using the words from specific episodes, from that brilliant Ukrainian translation we had,” said Yulia Po, 38, a Crimea native who grew up in a Russian-speaking environment and said she had learned Ukrainian thanks to “Friends.”As a 13-year-old coming home after school, she recalled, she would have just enough time to fry herself potatoes and get comfortable with a plate in front of the television before the show aired.She left Crimea after Russia occupied it in 2014, now refuses to speak Russian on principle, and has not been home or seen her parents since leaving, she said. “So I have a lot of emotions for this show,” Ms. Po said, adding, “Back then, when I escaped Crimea, I was depressed and I watched it and watched it, and it helped.”Last weekend, when she learned that Mr. Perry had died, she felt a slight sadness.“This is just a humane emotion to feel sad — there is always a space for it,” Ms. Po said. “He was with me for a long time and gave me many reasons to laugh.” More

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      Matthew Perry Is Mourned by Friends and Colleagues

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      Fans and celebrities paid tribute to Perry, who died at age 54 on Saturday.Celebrities, actors and entertainment and political leaders shared tributes to Matthew Perry, who starred on the hit television series “Friends” and died on Saturday at the age of 54.His death was confirmed by Capt. Scot Williams of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery-homicide division. Although there was no immediate cause of death, there was no indication of foul play.On social media on Sunday, Perry’s fans and colleagues celebrated the actor, who played the sardonic Chandler Bing on more than 200 episodes of the NBC sitcom “Friends,” which followed a group of young professionals living in Manhattan.On the show, Perry starred with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow.Fans and colleagues remembered Perry for his acting talent and kindness.The show’s Facebook page said: “He was a true gift to us all. Our heart goes out to his family, loved ones, and all of his fans.”NBC, which aired “Friends” from 1994 to 2004, said on Facebook that Perry “brought so much joy to hundreds of millions of people around the world with his pitch perfect comedic timing and wry wit.”The network added, “His legacy will live on through countless generations.”“Saturday Night Live” featured a black-and-white tribute card of Perry at the end of this weekend’s broadcast. He hosted the show in 1997.Morgan Fairchild, who played Chandler Bing’s mother on “Friends,” wrote on social media that she was “heartbroken about the untimely death of my ‘son’, Matthew Perry.”“The loss of such a brilliant young actor is a shock,” she said.Cast members of “Friends.” From left to right: David Schwimmer as Ross Geller, Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green, Courteney Cox as Monica Geller, Perry as Chandler Bing, Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay and Matt LeBlanc as Joey Tribbiani.Warner Bros. Television, via Getty ImagesMaggie Wheeler, who portrayed Chandler’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Janice and who had a memorable laugh on “Friends,” posted a photo of herself with Perry on Instagram.“What a loss,” she wrote. “The world will miss you.” Wheeler added: “The joy you brought to so many in your too short lifetime will live on.”Perry, who grew up in Ottawa, was also mourned by Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who was a childhood friend.“Matthew Perry’s passing is shocking and saddening,” Trudeau said. “I’ll never forget the schoolyard games we used to play, and I know people around the world are never going to forget the joy he brought them.”The Ottawa Senators hockey organization also paid tribute to Perry, writing, “Saddened to learn about the passing of Matthew Perry, one of Ottawa’s proudest sons and 𝑡ℎ𝑒 biggest hockey fan.” The post included a clip of Perry attending a game.The actress Selma Blair, who appeared in an episode of “Friends,” posted a photo of herself with Perry on Instagram. She described him as “my oldest boy friend.”She added: “All of us loved Matthew Perry, and I did especially. Every day. I loved him unconditionally. And he me. And I’m broken. Broken hearted. Sweet dreams Matty. Sweet dreams.”In an Instagram story, the actress Rumer Willis recalled hanging around Perry and her father, Bruce Willis, when they worked on movies together, including the 2000 film “The Whole Nine Yards.”She said that Perry “was so kind and funny and sweet with my sisters and me and I think his physical Comedy and that movie still makes me laugh so much.”“I know he had many challenges in his life and brought a lot of joy to people with his comedy,” Willis continued, adding, “I hope he can rest peacefully.” More

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      in Music

      Ireland Says Goodbye to Sinéad O’Connor at Funeral Procession

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      In the coastal town of Bray, south of Dublin, the site of Ms. O’Connor’s last Irish home, mourners gathered to pay their respects to the singer.At the close of a life poised between tradition and rebellion, Ireland gave Sinéad O’Connor a send-off on Tuesday that embraced both.In keeping with an old Irish custom, her coffin was first carried past her last family home in Ireland, in Bray, County Wicklow.But many of those who gathered, or who left her tributes, brought a spirit more in keeping with her life as a rebel who took on the establishment — most notably the Roman Catholic Church — and who spoke up for the oppressed. Among the signs left in front of her family home was one that read “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “GAY PRIDE” and “REFUGEES WELCOME.”At noon, the cortege reached Ms O’Connor’s former home on Bray’s seaside promenade. The crowd broke into prolonged applause, with some raising fists in salute. Many were in tears. Earlier, as thousands of people waited for her cortege to pass alongside the small town’s seaside promenade, a classic Volkswagen van draped in rainbow and Rastafarian flags had played a selection of her music from speakers. The playlist mixed her rock and pop hits with her renditions of Irish traditional ballads, including “The Foggy Dew.”Ms. O’Connor, who was found dead in her London apartment last month, converted to Islam in 2018, and her family will give her a Muslim burial on Tuesday. While the family wished to keep the funeral private, they invited the public to come to Bray for a last farewell.Some of those lining the streets — suddenly sunny after days of gray skies — were avid music fans. Others were activists, and there were also abuse survivors who had drawn strength from Ms. O’Connor’s openness about her own experience of childhood trauma. Dave Sharp, who said he had spent years in care homes and been the victim of abuse, traveled to Bray from Glasgow on Monday.“We didn’t have much notice but I’d promised myself that I’d be there for her,” he said. “Sinéad O’Connor is one of the bravest women I’ve ever known of. She not only put her life and career on the line, but she was ahead of her time.”The president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, will attend the funeral with his wife, Sabrina.“The outpouring of grief and appreciation of the life and work of Sinéad O’Connor demonstrates the profound impact which she had on the Irish people,” he said in a statement. Speaking of her “immense heroism” and the pain it caused her, he added: “That is why all those who are seeking to make a fist of their life, combining its different dimensions in their own way, can feel so free to express their grief at her loss.”In accordance with an old Irish custom, her coffin was first carried past her last family home in Ireland, on the seaside promenade in Bray.Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersIn recent days, among a rolling wave of tributes, a creative agency temporarily augmented a World War II territorial marker on nearby Bray Head to celebrate the singer. Where once it said “Eire” — Irish for Ireland — to warn belligerent aircraft that they were approaching neutral Irish territory, the giant sign now says “Eire 🤍 Sinéad.”Passionate and often controversial, Ms. O’Connor had slowly become, in the eyes of many, a national treasure, a woman who spoke up for the weak and oppressed, and who took an early stand against the abuses of the Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere.Her public struggles with mental health inspired protective feelings in fans and supporters, and added to the grief at news of her untimely death at age 56. Although an autopsy has been completed in London, no cause of death has yet been given.Ms. O’Connor, performing in Avenches, Switzerland, in 2008, had become a national treasure in the eyes of many.Ennio Leanza/EPA, via ShutterstockOver the weekend, performers and crowds came together at summer music festivals around the island to sing some of the musician’s most beloved songs, such as “Mandinka,” and “Black Boys on Mopeds.”The week before, the crowd fell silent, then applauded, at Ireland’s biggest sporting occasion, the inter-county Gaelic football final in Dublin’s 80,000-capacity Croke Park, as the big screens played the famous video of her version of “Nothing Compares 2 U.”Even the church, famously the target of her anger, has paid respects. Speaking last week, before the annual ancient pilgrimage to climb Croagh Patrick in the west of Ireland, the Catholic primate of Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin, said he had heard many stories about her kindness.“Clearly her own trauma and her own personal experiences made her a very compassionate person who reached out to the marginalized — she had real empathy,” he said. “God rest her troubled soul.”Flowers, messages and gifts were piled in front of Ms. O’Connor’s former home, many paying tribute to her empathy and the causes she supported.Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters More

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      in Theater

      He Made a Show About Grief. She Saw Herself in It.

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      Audible Theater’s leader and the creator of “Sorry for Your Loss” hope the autobiographical comedy helps others learn to talk about grief.Things are not necessarily as they appear. In Michael Cruz Kayne’s “Sorry for Your Loss,” a comedy show about grief, that is a prominent theme.When the producer Kate Navin caught the show last year at Caveat, a comedy theater on the Lower East Side in New York, she knew the instant he displayed a photo of himself with his wife and two children what he wasn’t telling the audience: that this wasn’t the full picture of his family, that it couldn’t be, because one of his three children had died.“In that moment I felt — I don’t want to use the word ‘seen’ because it can be cliché, but that’s the best word,” Navin said recently at a cafe in Greenwich Village.Her own family photos work the same way. Her first son, Jack, was 2 years and nine months old when he died in a fire with his grandmother, Navin’s mother-in-law, 10 years ago this August. Ask Navin what Jack was like and she’ll tell you he loved the movie “Cars,” prized raspberries above all foods and was remarkably kind — unusual for a toddler, she knows, having had two more.“You’d give him a bowl of raspberries and he’d hand them out to everybody in the room first before he’d start eating,” she said. “That was Jack. He was unbelievable.”Navin was deliberately not going to produce shows about grief when she joined the audio entertainment company Audible in 2017 to head its theater division.But when Daniel Goldstein, a writer-director who is a mutual friend of Navin and Kayne, took her to see “Sorry for Your Loss,” thinking that she might have a professional interest in it, he was correct. She thought the embrace of its humor could help other “lost parents,” as she calls them.Michael Cruz Kayne, pictured with his family in “Sorry for Your Loss,” a comedy show about reckoning with the death of his son.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show running through June 10 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Audible Theater’s Greenwich Village base, is the latest iteration of “Sorry for Your Loss,” with shinier production values than Kayne, a staff writer on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” is accustomed to having at comedy clubs. Here he ponders the mysteries of permanent absence and lingering presence, and pokes at the culture’s deep discomfort with the inevitability of death and loss.Kayne, who hosts a podcast called “A Good Cry,” performed the first version of “Sorry for Your Loss” not long after a tweet he sent in November 2019, marking the 10th anniversary of the death of his son Fisher, from sepsis at 34 days old.Kayne had grown tired of not talking about that central fact of his life, which he said in a separate interview had become “the elephant in the room of my whole brain.” After the tweet went viral, he took that conversation to the stage, making a funny autobiographical show that allows sadness in.“I’m still at a point with it where I am happy to be identified with the story of my son,” Kayne said. “If that means that for a while, or forever, I am Grief Boy, things could be worse. This subject isn’t the only thing I want to contribute to the universe. But if it stopped here, I would feel like I got to say the thing I really wanted to say most of all.”These were not, by the way, maudlin interviews. But Navin did tear up when she recounted how terrified she had been of grocery shopping after Jack died, because she wouldn’t know what to say if she ran into one of his friends and they asked where he was.In the experience that Kayne articulates in the show, she recognized her own surreal isolation.She wants no one’s pity. But mention a child who died to someone who didn’t know, she said, and the conversation may not recover, because no matter how long ago it happened, people react as if your grief is fresh, and as if you are broken.“The mood shifts,” she said. “And it’s hard to be the person who caused the mood shift.”Kayne and Navin would like people to be less awkward about grief, which would let those who need to talk about it stop keeping it to themselves. “Sorry for Your Loss” provides one space for that.When I asked Kayne if he believes that art can heal, he quoted the W.H. Auden line “poetry makes nothing happen,” which he said he thinks about a lot.“I do think it’s possible for art to at least make you feel like you are not alone,” he allowed. “It’s so much to know that I’m not the only person who feels this way. If that is healing, which I think it is a little, then yes, I think art can heal people.”Navin, for her part, is certain that Kayne has changed her in a way that feels good, making her “less sheepish” about telling people that she has three children, and less worried about people’s reaction.“That’s a huge gift,” she said. “And he just makes me feel less damaged. Truly I feel less damaged than I did a year ago.” More

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      Paul Simon Confronts Death, Profoundly, on ‘Seven Psalms’

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      The 81-year-old songwriter ruminates on mortality, faith and meaning in an album that could be a farewell.What do songwriters do when they feel death approaching? As time runs out, some choose to spend it by determinedly creating music to outlive them.“Seven Psalms” sounds like a last testament from the 81-year-old Paul Simon. It’s an album akin to David Bowie’s “Blackstar” and Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” which those songwriters made as mortality loomed; they each died days after the albums were released.Their generation of singer-songwriters has dedicated itself to chronicling their entire lives, biographically and metaphorically, from youth through last words. “Blackstar” was turbulent and exploratory; “You Want It Darker” was stoically bleak. “Seven Psalms” stays true to Simon’s own instincts: observant, elliptical, perpetually questioning and quietly encompassing.The album is constructed as a nearly unbroken 33-minute suite, nominally divided into seven songs that circle back to recurring refrains. It has places of lingering contemplation and it has sudden, startling changes; its informality is exactingly planned.Simon begins the album in his most casual tone. Over calmly precise and rhythmically flexible guitar picking, he sings, “I’ve been thinking about the great migration.”Almost immediately, it becomes clear that the migration is from life to death, a transition the singer is preparing to make himself. He’s thinking about time, love, culture, family, music, eternity and God, striving to balance skepticism and something like faith. “I have my reasons to doubt/A white light eases the pain,” Simon sings in “Your Forgiveness.” “Two billion heartbeats and out/Or does it all begin again?”Simon’s songwriting has never been particularly religious. Over the years, he has drawn on gospel music for songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Loves Me Like a Rock,” which bring religious imagery to secular relationships, and his 2011 album, “So Beautiful or So What,” had touches of Christian imagery — but also imagined “The Afterlife” as one last bureaucracy, where arrivals have to “Fill out a form first/And then you wait in a line.”“Seven Psalms” is more humble and awe-struck. Its refrains return to, and work variations on, the album’s opening song, “The Lord.” As in the psalms of the Bible — which, as Simon notes in “Sacred Harp,” were songs — Simon portrays the Lord in sweeping ways: wondrous and terrifying, both protector and destroyer, sometimes benign and sometimes wrathful. The Lord, Simon sings, is “a meal for the poorest, a welcome door to the stranger.” Then he turns to naming 21st-century perils: “The Covid virus is the Lord/The Lord is the ocean rising.”Much of the music sounds like solitary ruminations: Simon communing with his guitar, which has been the subtly virtuosic underpinning of most of his lifetime of songs. As his fingers sketch patterns, he latches onto melody phrases and then lets them go, teasing at pop structures but soon dissolving them. And around him, at any moment, sounds can float out of the background: additional supportive guitars, the eerie microtonal bell tones of Harry Partch’s cloud-chamber bowls, the jaunty huffing of a bass harmonica and, in the album’s final moments, the voice of his wife, Edie Brickell.In the course of the album, Simon sings about personal distress and societal tensions. In “Love Is Like a Braid,” a song of gratitude and vulnerability, he sings, “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows until the real deal came/Broke me like a twig in a winter gale.” In “Trail of Volcanoes,” he juxtaposes youthful exploits with adult realities: “The pity is the damage that’s done/Leaves so little for amends”Meanwhile, Simon’s tartly aphoristic side reappears in “My Professional Opinion,” a swipe at social media context collapse set to a country-blues shuffle. “All rise to the occasion/Or all sink into despair,” he sings. “In my professional opinion/We’re better off not going there.”He ends the album — possibly his last — with a song called “Wait.” He protests, “My hand’s steady/My mind is still clear.” Brickell’s voice arrives to tell him, “Life is a meteor” and “Heaven is beautiful/It’s almost like home.” At the end, he harmonizes with her on one word, extended into five musical syllables: “Amen.” It sounds like he’s accepting the inevitable.Paul Simon“Seven Psalms”(Owl Records/Legacy Recordings) More

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      Facing Death, a Pianist Recorded Music of Unspeakable Emotions

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      Lars Vogt, for one of his final albums made before dying from cancer, turned to chamber music by Schubert with Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff.There are recordings that are meant for the ages, that are intended to sound definitive. There are recordings that document a fleeting interpretation, that inspire or provoke, that accept the impossibility of a final word. And then there are the rare recordings whose circumstances defy the ordinary routines of an artist, that capture a high or a low moment in that person’s life and, matched to the right music, transcend it.In February 2021, Lars Vogt probably should not have traveled to Bremen, Germany, to join his close friends, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his sister, the cellist Tanja Tetzlaff, in recording Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat. Vogt, a widely beloved pianist and a conductor on the rise, arrived in pain; his doctors had asked him not to go, but to check into a hospital to await a conclusive diagnosis of the cancer that would take his life, at just 51, last September.Instead, Vogt sat down at a keyboard.“He did the most incredible things,” Christian said in an interview, adding that Vogt, his colleague of 26 years, suddenly played as if he had reached a kind of fulfillment or liberation. “Even on a technical level,” he continued, “I’d never heard him in this kind of perfection, exuberance, lightness. He was everything at the same time.”Vogt, who spoke openly about his illness, continued to perform until not long before his death; he was making plans for a U.S. tour with the Tetzlaffs this spring, on which they will now be joined by one of Vogt’s dearest students, Kiveli Dörken.Vogt’s remaining recordings include concertos by Mendelssohn and Mozart, as well as a Schubert album with the tenor Ian Bostridge.Anna VogtThe Schubert — to which Vogt and the Tetzlaffs added an earlier trio and other works by the composer for a double album, out on the Ondine label this week — was far from the pianist’s valedictory recording. With the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, of which he was music director, he taped Mendelssohn and Mozart concertos; with the tenor Ian Bostridge, Schubert’s “Schwanengesang.”But the E flat trio — a piece in which Schubert, a year short of his own death, peers into the darkness yet finds joy — became particularly significant to Vogt. “Feels a little bit like everything, at least in my life, has developed toward this Trio in E flat major,” he wrote after hearing the recording, in a message to the Tetzlaffs that is quoted in the album’s liner notes. “If not much time remains, then it’s a worthy farewell.”Schubert: Piano Trio in E Flat, finaleChristian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (Ondine)As Tanja tells it, an awareness of mortality was not entirely new in Vogt’s personality or artistry, though he necessarily felt it more strongly as his cancer treatment progressed.“It was always this strange mixture of feeling, ‘OK, there is death somewhere, and there is despair, frustration, whatever, it’s there because we’re human beings’ — and then, next moment, he would be the most silly and joyful person,” she said. “That’s what always made his playing so incredibly touching, because you see the whole range of the human tragedy, and the lightness of life.”Judging by his recordings, Vogt was a heartfelt soloist, excelling in the Bach-Schubert-Brahms lineage, yet he was arguably at his finest as a chamber musician; even the tone he gleaned from a piano — compassionate, never domineering — seems to invite collaboration. The Schubert album is the latest in a peerless series of releases with the Tetzlaffs that bears witness to a relationship not just between three artists of stature, but among intimates with a common, fearless commitment to expression.“It’s something that’s a bit hard to understand totally from the outside; there was a very strong symbiosis,” Reijo Kiilunen, the founder and managing director of Ondine, said of the trio’s recording sessions, in which they appeared to speak “a special language” with one another. “You simply hear it in their playing.”Before the Schubert, Vogt and the Tetzlaffs had essayed the three Brahms trios, as well as two by Dvorak; with Christian alone, there were accounts of sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. There is never the feeling, in any of those interpretations, that the instrumentalists are competing for the limelight or trying to impress anyone, least of all the listener; they are sharing the music with one another.One of those recordings has become especially poignant since it was made in 2015: a searing reading of Brahms’s Violin Sonata in G, which was also the last piece that Vogt and Christian played together, as nurses gathered to hear them perform a week or so before the pianist’s death.There is one passage, in the first movement, that movingly illustrates their partnership. It seems simple enough — the violin strums, like a guitar, as the piano adopts the searching main theme — and most duos play it simply, as a basic question of foreground and background. Yet Vogt’s tone is soft, withdrawn, as if he does not want the attention to fall entirely on himself, but would rather draw the ear to the support that Christian is offering, the essential accompaniment to his mournful song. There is no ego.Brahms: Violin Sonata in G, first movementChristian Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (Ondine)“In Lars’s words, which I think we all share,” Christian said, “the incredible difference between Schubert and Brahms is that Schubert shows you the absurdity, the horror and the beauty of everything, and Brahms actually takes you by your hand, and tries to give solace.” With Brahms, he added, “you have somebody at your side who is very much like you, and suffering like you. Whereas you are next to Schubert, and say, ‘Who is this giant?’”For the Tetzlaffs, Schubert’s E flat trio represents Vogt’s emotional landscape, as well as the strength he showed in the face of his illness. Finished in November 1827, the piece dwells on Beethoven’s death earlier that year: It is in the same key as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, and it likewise centers on a funeral march, in C minor, whose shadow is cast off only in a finale that takes consolation, of a sort, in compositional virtuosity, delighting as it layers themes on top of one another.“This is like a psychodrama with Lars dealing with the situation,” Christian said. “He would still have the loudest laughter and the wildest demeanor, engaging with us. But this is also what Schubert is doing in that slow movement: dealing with pain in a way that is not hiding, and not getting smaller, but getting bigger.”The funeral march, with moments of dignified hope that are interrupted by outbursts of extreme turmoil, is clearly a reckoning with the abyss, so much so that Schubert demands the impossible from the people playing it, much as grief asks of its sufferers. There is one point where the string lines are marked triple forte, yet crescendo from there, accents spiking the way. It’s unplayable writing, for unspeakable emotions.“He says, ‘Deal with it; say something,’” Christian explained of Schubert in those moments. “But how?”Schubert: Piano Trio in E Flat, Andante con motoChristian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (Ondine)For Vogt, music remained, to the end, a means of saying something. The Tetzlaffs said that he timed his chemotherapy treatments to fit his concert and recording schedule, and that playing helped keep him going.“It reminds me of a Ukrainian woman I know,” Tanja said. “She said, in Ukraine — because from one side, from the other side, it was always conquered by different people — there is a saying: When things get bad, we start laughing, and when things get unbearably bad, we make music; we sing.”Making music, “you are away, somehow, from real tragedies, but you can canalize everything that you are feeling and suffering from into something that becomes a moment,” Tanja continued. “It’s so incredibly important that we have this. I mean, what a miracle.” More

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      L’Rain Makes a Way Out of No Way

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More