Hello Emerson - To Keep Him Here (2024)

The whole album ” to Keep Him Here ” focuses on an event in 2017 that landed my father in the hospital for nine days, without any memory to explain why. This is about first hearing the news.

I remember that I got a call from Mom at work on a Wednesday. In a little office with a little window that looked out at the parking lot. And she didn’t really have any information. Just that she was on the highway driving up to the University of Michigan hospital. She called me to let me know, and to prepare me for when she called back later – either to tell me to stay home or to drive up.

Part of the difficulty of everything is that the event that led to his injury was a random accident while he was doing a random act of kindness. There’s nothing that anyone could do to prevent it. There’s no one to blame. We can do everything we can to avoid carcinogens, keep ourselves healthy, work out, eat well, and it is worth doing. But it also means nothing at the same time, because that’s just how the world works.