Taylor Swift’s “Twenty-Two” is maybe the blandest song to ever have been generated by a pop-country songwriting machine. For those who aren’t familiar, a copy can be found here. (For those who are unfamiliar and at work, it recounts the bland-but-accessible adventures of “ditch[ing] this whole scene” and “dreaming instead of sleeping.”) It’s a vanilla milkshake in song form, with a chorus of, “I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22,” backed by what I’m pretty sure are machine-generated righteous hand claps.
The song rose to prominence a few months before I turned 22 and graduated from college. At the same time, I was busy watching my mother die from the cancer that would eventually break her down past recognition, as cancer does.
In her truly excellent piece about High School Musical, Whitney Reynolds commented that her piece wasn’t “the cancer essay or the dead parent essay.” I can make no such claim. This is a dead parent essay with a thin veneer of pop music slapped on top.
The first time I heard Taylor Swift singing about the carefree fun of being 22 after I realized that my mother was really going to die, I punched the radio off. Like, actually hit my radio dial with some force. I regretted this later, since I drive a Civic and it’s not really built for punching.
“Fuck you,” I yelled at her, at the song, at the stupid top-40 radio station that was playing it. For good measure, I repeated it: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” Then, in the parking lot of the Tex-Mex restaurant nearest to what was still my parents’ house, I broke down and cried.
This was not the first time I had cried that week. That had happened in a grim hospital bathroom after talking with my mother. Hospital bathrooms are of course never not grim: they are built to accommodate the machinery that accompanies serious illness, and so the proportions are always just enough off to remind you that Someone You Love is Ill. Plus, the toilet paper is the worst.
A few months before, my mother had finished up with her chemo and gone through a 9-hour surgery. I skipped class for the first time in my college career in order to be there, and when we saw her finally come out of it, she was high enough on lingering anesthetic that she didn’t totally recognize my sister and me. Things got better, though, and in the weeks to come we had been tentatively hopeful. She was weak, but getting stronger. She had gone back to work.
There were no signs of cancer, and I looked as if she might be one of the infinitesimally small percentage of folks with her particular cancer to survive. (Do not Wikipedia your parent’s cancer. The page will include survival rates, and you will cry.)
Then she started coughing. Horribly. All the time. It was this cough that had landed her back in the hospital where I was crying in the bathroom. A few minutes earlier, my mother had – after supportively feigning interest in my summary of what I’d learned about the sexual habits of monkeys that day in class, because she was a good mom – told me that the doctors were pretty sure that her cancer had come back. She was too weak from the surgery for them to be able to treat her any further.
After confirming with her that this meant what I thought it did, I went to the bathroom. I stared at the wall and tried very, very hard not to cry. It didn’t work. After a moment, I got it together enough to come back out and keep talking to my mother before my next class.
My mother asked me if I was having digestive issues. I don’t think she realized that I hadn’t, until that moment, accepted that the cancer was going to be what killed her.
She had already known that it would. Before she was a cancer patient, she was a cancer nurse, and a remarkably pragmatic person besides. She had been working at the sausage factory behind cancer treatment while the rest of us had been hanging out grilling hot dogs. She had told us before the surgery that, realistically, the question wasn’t whether the cancer was going to kill her, it was when.
So, when I heard that stupid song in the parking lot where I was sitting with my burrito, I lost it. I cried all of the tears that I had wanted to cry in the hospital bathroom inside of the marginally more comfortable driver’s seat of my car. I was surprised–for the first of many times in the coming months – at just how much fluid a human body could produce, if it is really committed to doing so.
This is probably not the reaction that the producers of the song hoped to elicit.
The thing about the song – the perfect, beautiful, mass-produced song – is that it is perfectly calculated to trigger faintly positive emotions in 99% of the song-listening populace. It is a wholesome party girl anthem, devoid of intensity and rebellion. The video is clear: being 22 is about hanging out on the beach, eating weirdly demolished birthday cake and building code-obeying bonfires with one’s tall blonde friends. It’s about Fun! And Friends! And Pool Time With Lady Bros! (And possibly about casual sex, but it’s never totally possible to tell.)
Friends would ask how my mother was doing, and I would tell them a sanitized version of how bad it was to watch my mother drowning because of her failing lungs, and the conversation would – despite the best efforts of my wonderful friends – sort of peter out. It turns out that even the very best of your friends will eventually run out of responses to conversations which dead-end in you crying. I would have given anything to occupy Taylor Swift’s beautiful, bland, made-up musical world because I would have given anything to avoid making people uncomfortable all of the time.
Beneath the anger and car-punching, my reaction to that song was mostly about jealousy. Not about generally being Taylor Swift – I know my hair will never be that shiny – but about people for whom the song was feasibly relatable. In the midst of watching my mother die, I desperately wanted a life that could have slotted into the generic worldview of that three-minute slice of pop. No one around me was talking about cat ears and exes and bonfires – but I was just as disconnected from the actual discussions about books and booze and naps because in the back of my head was a tiny little voice chanting “momisgoingtodiemomisgoingtodie,” and later – when she was too sick to protect me from seeing how sick she was anymore – “momisdyingmomisdyingmomisdying.”
I was mad at the cancer for killing my mom, and I was mad at myself for not being better at helping my family take care of her, and I was mad at Taylor Swift for reminding me of all of that.
But I couldn’t fix any of that. So instead I developed intense fantasies of stealing Taylor Swift’s weird smashed birthday cake, and continued to bruise my hands on my car’s dash.
I know that eventually, the pointless anger towards Taylor Swift will fade, as will the rawness of the memories of the past few months. In a year or two, I’ll be able to add the song to some Spotify playlist, or nod along to it in the grocery story, and all that I’ll remember just how very glad I am that I’m not 22 anymore.
Tags: breakdowns in parking lots, cancer, death, moms, relationships, taylor swift
Oh Emily. Beautiful and heartbreaking. Things are not supposed to happen this way. Your mum sounds like an incredibly good mum.
I am so, so, so sorry for your loss, Emily! This is an amazing piece of writing. My mom is technically in the “cured” zone (five years post) but I am still totally haunted by the “not if, but when” thing.
When I was 23 and cancer was killing my sister, I would cry in my parked car and hit my steering wheel hard enough to bruise my hands. You’ve expressed this brutal and drawn-out loss so well- thank you for putting it into words. I am so sorry for you and for your mom.
This was so moving. Thank you.
This was beautiful. Thank you.
There is something about crying in the car, I can never hold it in there. I’m sorry for your loss Emily.
Exactly. I don’t know if it’s the being alone, or the random radio songs, or the sense of being in a Between Space, but I’ve been doing a lot of car crying lately. It’s weird to be sobbing when you’re hurtling down the highway at 70 miles an hour.
I car cry like it’s my job.
Ugh, yes, cars are such weird, liminal spaces, somehow they are perfect for crying. Where would people have crying jags before cars were invented? Out on the moors?
The jealousy – one of the weirdest and most unexpected layer in the onion of grief that was my mom’s death. Trivial frustrations with classmates, colleagues, acquaintances turned into complete breakdowns when I realized “AND she/he still has a MOM!”
My mom died when I was 21 – I am so, so sorry for your loss. And for the absence of a carefree, demolished-birthday-cake sort of 22nd year in both of our lives.
I still get that jealousy, years later. It is so specific and so unruly.
My partner just died a month ago. It is obviously not the same as losing a parent, but now I’m watching a bunch of friends get married and engaged and love their special people, and I get so angry. Ovarian cancer is a bitch. I’m so glad you guys understand.
Oh god, I’m so sorry.
When I was 23 and my dad was dying, I remember sitting in the hospital parking lot cry/screaming hysterically because that song “How to Save a Life” came on the radio. I know that song is not about your dad dying from brain cancer after he “beat” prostate cancer, but the repetition of the words “how to save a life” when my dad’s couldn’t be saved was infuriating. It was the worst year of my life and I still get mad when I hear that song. So what I’m saying is: it’s not the same, because grief is never the same, but I have all the empathetic feels after reading this.
I identify so strongly with this and the Halo comment downthread. I was 22 last fall and it was my sister and it was ovarian. My overplayed/radio/incidental/out-of-context choking-crying songs was Locked Out of Heaven by Bruno Mars. That top-of-his-lungs “Can I just stay here/spend the rest of my days here?” line was the worst thing.
And I don’t hate the song 22 at all, but it did make me sick to my stomach with jealousy.
Perfection, Emily. I especially love everything that falls below “Beneath the anger and car-punching…” I’m so sorry for your loss, and I am sending so much love your way!
Man oh man, Emily, I know from whence you come. The song becomes, like, your grief amanuensis. When my dad was dying, my song was Halo by Beyonce. I would leave the hospital (place of being strong and positive and helpful) and sit in my car and turn it up and just let all the fluids out for the whole length of the song, and then go home (place of being strong and positive and helpful and aksi answering relatives’ emails).
It took years before I could even hear it in a store without having to clap my hand over my mouth and run out of the building.
Oh, Emily, I’m so sorry about your mom. My dad died suddenly and tragically in August, and your anger and sadness seem very familiar. I wish I could give you Taylor’s smashed birthday cake, but instead I’m sending you hugs and good thoughts and strength.
This, totally this. My mom died from cancer at the beginning of my senior year or high school and it was just so disorienting to realize that everyone else was just busy being 17. She died more than 15 years ago and it does get better, but as Dr Ladybusiness said above, some things never really disappear.
Thank you everyone for the incredibly kind words/stories. I am so glad and so sorry that the piece resonated with folks.
Also, thank you Mallory for the “breakdowns in parking lots” tag, may it never have to be used again.
Thank you so much for sending this to us, and I’m really, really sorry about your mom.
My partner died a month ago (ovarian cancer) and yeah, THAT FUCKING SONG. I’ve felt a lot of rage at top 40 radio over the past year, watching her slowly die. I wish my problems were as trivial as those of Taylor Swift and that guy Lena Dunham was dating with that Fun band. I developed this really bitter voice in my head to deal with the anger of having my partner ripped from me by a terrible illness, like this:
It feels like one of those nights!
To dress up as hipsters! (while wearing a hoodie and scrub pants a nurse gave me)
Make fun of our exes! (no, calling my nice ex to sit with me after she died)
I thought about this piece and how great it is all last night. It is really good, Emily, and I am so sorry.
Even now I’m 35, the world is still divided into those who’ve lost a parent and those who haven’t. I joined the former club at 27 and still seem to be in the minority among my peers.
So true: never look up the prognosis online. I’m sorry for your loss. For all our losses.
Even now I'm 35, the world is still divided into those who've lost a parent and those who haven't. I joined the former club at 27 and still seem to be in the minority among my peers.
So true: never look up the prognosis online. I'm sorry for your loss. For all our losses.