Passing Through

The other night as my 2-year-old daughter, Eula, did her best not to sleep, I did as I always do and sang her songs. My mother did the same for me when I was a child. Like Eula, I resisted sleep too.

Around the fourth or fifth number, anticipating my sign off, Eula turned toward me in the dark and whispered, “Passing Through.” It took me a moment to realize what she had said. Because up until that point she’d never requested a song by its given title.

Once it registered that she wanted me to sing Leonard Cohen’s “Passing Through,” I was elated. And of course, I immediately started assigning a deeper meaning to it. She’ll be a historian, I thought; or maybe a philosopher, even; or perhaps a songwriter—and a damn good one at that if she likes “Passing Through.”

To be fair the song is that good. In four verses, Cohen takes listeners through epics of history beginning with Jesus’ crucifixion and ending on the night President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died.

Meanwhile, the chorus goes:

Passing through, passing through
Sometimes happy, sometimes blue
Glad that I ran into you
Tell the people that you saw me passing through

Right now, as thousands die daily all around the world from Covid-19, that message feels particularly poignant. Whether now or later, we’ll all eventually perish. For some the fact is simply unimaginable, for others it’s a terrifying reality best ignored, and for a few it’s a subject of endless fascination.

I happen to fall into the final category. And perhaps that’s why I admire the song. Because Cohen lures his listeners into confronting their own mortality as they simultaneously nod their heads and sing along.

Indeed, there is something celebratory in the chorus itself—the way the backup vocals join Cohen’s deep baritone in a small, gospel-like choir praising our collective destiny. All the while, each new verse builds upon the chorus’ central theme that our time here is limited but our contributions factor into a larger, complex narrative that we’ll never fully understand.

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And that’s where my mind eventually went as I continued to sing the song to my daughter. At one point, I imagined her singing it to her future child long after I’m gone. It made me happy just to think about passing something like that on.
Then I went somewhere else entirely.

I thought:

At some point there will be another father—a stranger—singing a song like Cohen’s to his child. Only it won’t be “Passing Through.” The song will be something other. Something not yet written. But it will no doubt hit on similar themes. On life’s brevity and death’s certainty and the strange things we do in between.

And I thought:

Maybe this future song will feature a verse describing the coronavirus and the frontline workers who gave everything, and the nonessential workers who lost nearly just as much, and some of the strange people in the middle who seemed unmoved by these sacrifices, who disregarded and trivialized wearing masks, who couldn’t care less about social distancing, who continued to laugh droplets of saliva and conspiracy across public squares.

As I neared the end of the fourth and final verse of “Passing Through”—the one where FDR dies—this I knew:

One day that future child will ask her future father to sing that future song by name. And even though the song itself will be filled with life’s struggles, the parent will be overjoyed by the request—suddenly aware that the child’s approval is as temporary as everything mentioned in the song.

Hopefully, the parent will realize that’s what made the initial request so precious in the first place. If the parent does, he will sing to the child and be happy to be alive in whatever moment they’re living in. And when he reaches that future final verse, he will try desperately to stretch out the last lines for as long as he can.

But the words will run out. They must. And the toddler will sleep. And the parent will sleep too. And together they will pass through the night, as we all do.

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