Marcella Meehan (1942-2022)

My Mom passed away May 11, 2022. She was a great mom, and in many ways, I am my mother’s son. We had similar personalities, senses of humor, and a strong psychic connection. Most of my better qualities can be directly attributed to her, and she should not be blamed for my shortcomings of character.

Obituaries have been written, remembrances and eulogies spoken, but, of course, they only captured a small part of who she was. With that in mind I thought i would use this space to write about one of her most unique facets. One that I think only my father, sister and I know about. Given that this is my music website, I thought I would write about my Mom’s remarkable hearing as those who find themselves here may be aurally inclined.

My mother had an extraordinary sense of hearing in two ways:

First, my mother could hear very (very) quiet sounds from very far away. I am not exaggerating to say it was super-human ability. Her hearing was more like a bat or a wolf, then that of a human, especially a human, who in the end, nearly every organ and system was failing in some way. Except her hearing. I would test this all the time, and I was always in awe and surprised without fail.

During one of her final stays in a rehab facility a nurse called me out of her room to tell me something she did not want my mother to hear. We stepped down the hall a bit and she started speaking in a semi-hushed tone. I stopped her and said, “You know, she can hear you.” The nurse looked at me in complete disbelief. So I quietly said to her: “So, the question is whether my mother prefers strawberry or chocolate ice cream, right?” The nurse looked totally confused. I brought her back into the room and said to my mother. “Mom, we have a question for you…” She replied without further prompting: “Strawberry!” The nurse was astounded, and then took me much further down the hall.

Second, my mother could easily discern multiple conversations from what most of us would consider a din. Imagine a wedding reception or a crowded diner on Sunday morning. Put Marcella in the room and she would enter something of a trance. Listening. Hyper focused. You could still talk to her, because she was listening to you too, but she was also eavesdropping on at times it would seem like five or six separate, simultaneous conversations. All of which she could tell you about individually. People were also drawn to her, and liked to talk to her, so at the end of an event she was an amazing wealth of information. She knew everyone in the room, their life stories, their chatter, and their whispers.

There is a section of Hermann Helmholtz’s foundational text on the physics of sound called On the Sensations of Tone, In one section, which initially drew me in when I found it as a teen, Baron von Helmholtz describes sitting in a ballroom and practically watching sound waves emanate from bodies and objects:

We have to imagine a perfectly similar spectacle proceeding in the interior of a ballroom. For instance, here we have a number of musical instruments in action, speaking men and women, rustling garments, gliding feet, clinking glasses, and so on.

All of these causes give rise to systems of waves, which dart through the mass of the air in the room, are reflected from its walls, return, strike the opposite wall, are again reflected, and so on, until they die out. We have to imagine that from the mouths of men and from the deeper musical instruments, there precede waves of from 8 to 12 feet in length, C to F.

From the lips of women, waves of 2 to 4 feet in length, C to C.

From the rustling of the dress, a fine, small crumple of wave. And so on.

In short, tumbled entanglement of the most different kinds of motion, complicated beyond conception.

This immediately reminded me of my Mom, sitting in some loud room taking in all these competing, combining, ricocheting sounds.

My mother was always listening.

About a year prior to her passing, when she was already in serious decline, I was visiting her in Florida. She was asleep, slumped over in a chair with the television on. I was on the other side of a waist-high divider that separated the kitchen from the family room. I was doing dishes, and half singing, half mumbling Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” to myself. Now, whatever might have been barely audible should have been cancelled out by the white noise of the running water and the television, but as I mumbled a verse my mother, without raising her head or opening an eye said:

“You made that up!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You made that up”
“I made up what?”
“What you just sang, you made it up, it’s not in the song!”

Now, my mother was never much of a music fan, I did not grow up in a musical household. The only memory of music I have was us listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 Countdown on Sunday mornings. Other than that, the radio was rarely on, we did not have records, my parents did not play instruments (though they were very supportive of my efforts).

I said, incredulously:

“Do you know what song I am singing?”
“Yes.”
“What song is it?”
“I know it, I don’t know the name, but I know it.”
“Do you know who it’s by?”
“No.”
“When is the last time you heard it?”
“I don’t know.” (becoming irritated with my questioning)
“Within 20 years?”
“Probably longer”
“So you are telling me I made up a verse to a Sam Cooke song that you maybe heard on the radio 25 years ago?”
“Yes, that last part is not in the song!”

The verse in question is:

Don't know much about the Middle Ages, looked at the pictures I just turn the pages
Don't know nothin' 'bout no rise and fall, don't know nothin' 'bout nothin' at all
Girl it's you that I've been thinkin' of, and if I could only win your love, oh,
What a wonderful, wonderful world this would be

I did not make this up. I could not have made this up.

I took this to be a sign of my mother’s cognitive decline that we had been told might be increasingly evident, and I thought nothing more of it….until I did. Aside from her hearing, my mother’s long-term memory was pretty extreme. She could remember days and times of minor events going back half a century: who was in the room, what they were wearing, small details about the setting, the day’s weather. I began to doubt myself.

I found the lyrics online, and sure enough my verse is in included. All of this made me want to hear the master sing it, so I found Sam Cooke’s version on Youtube. I listened with delight but as I anticipated the Middle Ages verse was coming up, I became a little sad, because I wanted her to be right. Even this small inconsequential mental slip seemed like an ominous sign of future decline.

The verse never came…

I played it again, and she was right,: though the verse in the lyrics, Cooke’s famous recording does not include it! My mother somehow had a blueprint of the song somewhere deep in her mind. My mumbling it a neighboring room, under a bed of noise, was enough for her to match it up, and declare, from her slumber that I made up the lyric!

With some further investigation I figured out that though the Sam Cooke version was the one I thought I was singing, I was adding the verse which I must have learned from a version by Terence Trent D’Arby which was the B-side to a 12” remix of his 80s hit Wishing Well, which I bought when it came out.

These special abilities are not why I love and miss my mother (one’s frailties seem to engender a deeper love, no?). But watching her listen was one of my joys, probably influenced my music practice, and remains one of my strongest, fondest memories of her. I am grateful for our time together, sitting, listening, talking, joking, especially in the end.