About us and about the music:
I’m a retired Geology Professor who is now mainly a facilitator for a number of groups of bereaved spouses and partners in northern Colorado. Andi was a multi-talented writer, painter, retailer, and a mother and grandmother. She was an intuitive keyboard player. With no formal training, she could still sit and improvise for hours. She also wrote poems and verses and had some of her work published as greeting cards and in anthologies for Blue Mountain Arts. She is now a strong, graceful and beautiful spirit after her eight year battle with breast cancer came to an end in 2016.
Andi and I first came to Fort Collins, Colorado in 2008 for what was planned to be a short vacation. We were actually brought here so that we could find the wonderfully positive and skilled medical team that helped and supported Andi through her cancer journey, and we decided to stay and let them treat her for as long as possible.
Andi’s cancer journey changed our lives in almost every way. If it changed our love, it only made it stronger. As we traveled together through it all, I see us as becoming ever closer and our love beginning to take on an ever-growing spiritual character.
We began to be bound together not only by our lives together in the material world but our spirit-selves became more and more active and we became more and more aware of those parts of ourselves as our connection, spirit to spirit (soul to soul) was strengthened and expanded as we lived through those times together.
I believe this profoundly affected the way we lived those years and the way in which we approached the end of Andi’s time here as her body failed and she reached the end of her life in the material world. In many ways, it determined much of how my grief journey unfolded as well.
Andi’s spirit, as well as the grace and courage with which she faced her cancer journey, has become my inspiration and guide for almost everything in my life. She continues to send me her words, visions and music on the spirit wind. Much of what I’ve learned and how I’ve changed during the years of my grief journey are due to her continuing presence in my life.
The Music:
One of the more amazing parts of that journey center in the music we have shared. I’ve written a number of places in the book about songs I have found coming through me into the world that Andi sent me the words for and how I was able to hear them in my head and transcribe them to capture her part of the music. We have written eight songs together this way and I hope that more are yet to come. They are songs of bereavement, they are places we have found words and music to express the emotions and feelings that have been part of my grief journey at different places along the way.
Also, as one of the things I learned during the first years of my bereavement, I began learning to do digital recording and started to explore creating MIDI music. MIDI uses “software instruments” to create music in an entirely digital environment on the computer, mostly using a keyboard that generates digital notes that the computer translates into instrument sounds.
My biggest problem at that point was that while I do play guitar, I don’t really play the keyboard. I don’t have much of a feel for it and certainly have no technique for making it sound like music.
But, one day I sat down and got everything hooked up and plugged into the keyboard anyway. Before I began to try playing, I was thinking about Andi’s music, her chords and melodies and how they remained in my memory. I hit the record button and just started to let my fingers move over the keys. After a few notes I could feel Andi’s spirit come over me, and the music changed from my stumbling notes to a series of chords and a calming and peaceful melody.
I sat there in awe and knew it was Andi’s music coming through. Tears started flowing, and I just welled up with emotion at what was happening and the possibility that I could be the instrument through which her music could again enter into the material world, a sharing and a gift across the veil.
These stories and what’s behind them are expanded and fleshed out in the book in a number of places.
I have posted some of the MIDI music under the MUSIC tab on this website and the songs will be added to that page as I record them.