Dear Reader: How Taylor Swift Holds Me Through My Grief

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Welcome, dear reader, to, well, Dear Reader — our monthly series highlighting personal essays and in-depth reports from writers in our very own Taypedia community.

In this issue, we have “How Taylor Swift Holds Me Through My Grief” by the incomparable Exquisite Williams (complete with her very own Taylor Swift grief playlist).

We hope you enjoy,

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How Taylor Swift Holds Me Through My Grief

By: Exquisite Williams

Hold on to the memories they will hold on to you. There are some Taylor Swift lyrics that you don’t comprehend in a moment, lyrics that just imbed themselves in your psych and wait to spring forth as a fully formed thought much later on. The bridge of “New Years Day” is one of those verses for me that I didn’t connect with right away, not like I have with other Taylor one-liners. It was like she was saying something profound that everyone else knew the secret too, everyone else was moved by, and I was being passed over. I wanted so badly to understand what every other person I knew heard. 

Bigger than the whole sky. On Wednesday, November 20^th, I was in my car when I got the news that my aunt, my mom’s big sister, had passed away. She had been in the hospital for twelve days at that point. My entire family had been suspended in the air, a coin frozen mid flip for twelve days and when we finally came down it was in a free fall. My mom told me she was gone (I cannot bring myself to say that word. Even now I can’t type it. I understand now why Taylor only spells it, “d-y-i-n-g”, why she stutters over “how dare you say that its—") when I was making my way home from work. I parked in front of my house and sat there for two hours. No words appeared before me in the aftermath rang in my head truer than anything I have ever felt before. With everything else now gone, so was my ability to even string letters together. I am a writer, I always have words, always have more to say, more to contemplate, more to imagine, but even in all the worlds I construct, I could not comprehend how everything was never going to be the same again. 

I see you every day now. In a way my aunt would love, everything is about her now. In my grief over losing her I see her everywhere and in everything. She is in everything purple (our shared favorite color), she is in the sky. She is in my dreams and in my words. She is in the very name that she helped my mom pick out for me. Most of all I see her in Taylor’s music. When I want to plunge into the depth of my loss, when I want to allow the weight of everything that I can no longer have smother me, Taylor Swift has been a life raft. In all this cruelty and harsh reality of death, a reality that has always felt so far from my horizons, I feel held by Taylor and her songs.

Lights, Camera, Bitch Smile. With grief comes a constant forgetting and a constant horrible remembrance. I had an important interview the other day and five minutes before I started the zoom it hit me that I couldn’t call my aunt and tell her about it. I remembered in those few minutes the gravity of what I had lost. I couldn’t call her to ask for a prayer or advice. The only way I could keep it together was by repeating I’m a real tough kid, I can handle my shit. I’m a real tough kid, I can handle my shit, like a mantra. It was all I could do. Once again Taylor was there to catch me. 

I’d think you were singing to me now. My aunt loved music. She loved to sing, and she believed in nothing more than the healing power of music and worship. She knew how words could speak life into someone, even if those words were lyric someone else had written. I have this video of she sent to me a couple of years ago, it is thirty seconds long and she’s singing “I Just Called To Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder. The day I got the news I just played that video of loop. It settled in then that a tiny screen is the only place I would see her now.  In that moment, I understood with painstaking clarity what it must mean for Taylor to have had the voice of Marjorie on stage with her every night of the Eras tour. As usual she understood what I needed to hear, immortalized it and locked it away in a time capsule for me to find when I needed it most. 

And I will hold on to you. “New Years Day” has been complete reborn through my grief blurred glasses. The entire song hits me like a ton of bricks. The memories I have of my aunt are what I have left. She can never come back and every time I remember that I cling tighter to her spirit, her laugh that I could recognize anywhere, her stories, her prayers. When her last page was read, when the story of her life came to an end, I was still there. I stayed. 

My Taylor Grief Playlist:

As I continue to process this loss these are the songs that are bringing me comfort or making me cry and sometimes both at the same time. I hope it helps anyone else who needs it.

• Maroon

• You’re on your own kid

• Evermore

• Coney Island

• New Years Day 

• Marjorie

• Never Grow up 

• Bigger Than The Whole Sky

• Ours

• Down Bad

• loml

• Treacherous 

• Long Live 

• Dorothea

• *I Just Called to Say I Love You 

• I Can Do It With A Broken Heart

*”I Just Called to Say I Love You” is by Stevie Wonder but has a special spot of honor on this playlist.