Healings Questionnaire No. 5: Meaghan Garvey
Healings Questionnaire No. 5: Meaghan Garvey
A Q&A about death and god. “I believe rationalism to be finite, and life’s mysteries to be as boundless as the cosmos. God? Sure.”
Hey folks, welcome to the fifth installment of the Healings Questionnaire. A friend recently recommended I unfurl the backstory of this series a la the opening credits of Arrested Development, so imagine this in your best Ron Howard voiceover: And now a Q&A series about death and god, based on the same set of questions friends and strangers asked me repeatedly in the wake of my cancer diagnosis. It’s the Healings Questionnaire—dink dink doodly-doo…boink! Let’s go.
If you told me Meaghan Garvey was some kind of international spy posing as an author and music journalist, I’d believe it. Such is the air of intrigue, the keen eye for detail, and the graceful sophistication that suffuses her newsletter, Scary Sad Cool Goodbye. One minute she’s channeling Marguerite Duras from somewhere upriver in Vietnam, the next she’s unraveling a mystery about a 1920s nightclub singer and the affair she may or may not have had with either Meaghan’s grandfather or her great grandfather (or both? It’s a fascinating story). And when she’s not doing all that, she’s one of the most in-demand culture writers around, covering rap, pop, movies, and other ephemera for places like Billboard, NPR, The Cut, Pitchfork, and countless others.
Having followed and admired Meaghan’s work for some time, I have this image of her jetsetting around interviewing artists like Lana Del Rey and Doja Cat, then zipping off to foreign lands for a quick adventure and/or romantic rendezvous, all while consuming heady literature and music I stopped being cool enough to keep up with some time ago. Her answers below—melancholy, vulnerable, and funny as hell—are consistent with this pedigree. I hope they don’t blow her cover.
What happens when we die?
I recently purchased my first car and have spent my weekends cruising various Midwestern highways with due wonderment and awe. So I’ve been seeing lots of roadkill: foxes, raccoons, turkeys, big bloody deer. Perhaps their consciousnesses are co-mingling in the ether, but that seems a bit…insane? What I know is that they lie there in respective states of decay, feeding scary birds and hindering traffic. With any luck, they die close enough to where they might turn into mushrooms. That seems like your best bet.
Years ago I came upon a YouTube comment under a song I no longer recall. “So heaven does exist!” the first commenter said of the song. Months later, a second commenter pragmatically replied: “Yes, on Earth. But the problem is that hell is also on Earth.” The sentiment struck me as true, and I think of it each time I consider the afterlife — mostly driving through Wisconsin, whose billboards insist you reflect upon topics like heaven, hell, and just exactly when life begins. “HELL IS REAL,” they scream. Well, duh.
I’m about as big a Steve Albini fan as I am an atheist (eye roll on both counts) but this tweet of his from 2022 resonates nonetheless. To the prompt “Hey atheists, what gives your life meaning if you don’t believe in God?” he replies: “I detest this framing, that life, which is all we have, the experience of it, somehow isn’t enough. The living, that’s the meaning. There’s nothing else, get what you can out of it. Do it all. Wring the sponge.”
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being terrified and 1 being it’s never crossed your mind, how afraid are you of dying? Explain.
Oh, I’ll give it a 3. I’m not a therapized person, not that there’s anything wrong with it; simply not for me. But I think I get the gist of how to be alive and not be a total nervous wreck — you keep it simple. It seems to me that people love to overcomplicate this life thing. (There’s a great clip of Henry Miller speaking on the matter. “You live from moment to moment: this moment decides the next step,” he says in his charming New York accent, cigarette in hand. “You shouldn’t be five steps ahead, only the very next one. And if you can keep to that, you’re always alright.”) Please don’t think I say this from some haughty, knowing vantage. When it comes to the basics of so-called civilized adulthood — establishing “credit,” visiting the “dentist” — I’m already way over my head. If I started contemplating my mortality on the regular, you’d never get me out the door. Anyway, who cares? When it happens, I’ll be dead.
The only problem is that years ago, my sisters made a pact: Whichever one dies first, the other two commit solidarity suicide, Lisbon style. Let’s hope we can kick that can down the road for many years to come.
What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
To dying myself? Not very. I’ve been lucky in that way, having put myself in countless ponderously reckless situations from which I’ve made it out just fine. I once had reason to believe that the man with whom I’d rented a small cabin in the Northwoods of Wisconsin to pass New Year’s Eve had intentions to kill me (he’d promised as much) — but no dice. Or the time I got hit by a car on my bike and woke up in the E.R. with tubes in my arms, but all I left with was a gnarly black eye and a hangover. I thrive in the evasion space (death, taxes, what have you). I suppose what I’ve learned is that I’m untouchable, entitled to go on living with minimal regard for my health or future. Just kidding. Unless…
I have been in the room with death, having sat beside my mother as she went. It wasn’t a surprise; she’d been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer when I was 18, and I (then 21) was shocked at how much the moment felt like relief. She had suffered profoundly, and now things would be different — not better, but different nonetheless. I vividly recall when the people (EMTs? Who even were they?) came upstairs and zipped her body in a bag. I was the only witness; as such, they turned to me as if expecting… something, I don’t know what. In the direction of the bag I blew a kiss, privately reeling at how unlike me the gesture was, how stupid my mom would have thought it. My adulthood begins there.
Do you believe in God? Explain.
My very being screams against the notion of existence — the universe’s first spark, however it came — as random, or worse, “scientific.” (We invented that shit, no?) Don’t take this the wrong way, but I tire of a certain yuppie insistence on TRUSTING THE SCIENCE, as if everything in this world could be explained by people who spent most of their lives in a classroom. My concept of life is of the Twilight Zone variety: I believe rationalism to be finite, and life’s mysteries as boundless as the cosmos. God? Sure.
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
Something I’ve come to believe with total conviction is that our intuition connects us to God, universal consciousness, the meaning of it all. Through trial and error, I’ve established a wonderful relationship with my instincts, to where I’m certain that being in the right place at the right time is not a coincidence, but a skill. (I ran this by Lana Del Rey when I profiled her in 2019 and she agreed, for what it’s worth.) My main spiritual practice is in the continued exercise of my intuitive faculties. When I’m in the flow, I connect with the divine: Sometimes that’s falling in love at first sight with a stranger across the bar, or my favorite song coming on the jukebox, or opening a book at random to find exactly what I need to finish a piece I’m writing. The desire to stay in that flow drives almost everything I do.
Give me an example of a sacred text, for you personally—a work of some kind (book, album, song, painting) that’s essential to the formation of your spiritual worldview. Explain.
The first time I heard a Townes Van Zandt song I literally forgot to breathe, so struck was I by not just the music but the outlook: existential despair, psychedelic loneliness, euphoria, bad jokes, ancient visions of hell and flashes of the American sublime. It’s not that I relate to Townes’ songs exactly, but they ring with a truth I’ve heard nowhere else. Between “Rake” and “Nothin’” is enough for a religion.
The blues is sacred this way, too. Real blues music by Junior Kimbrough, Furry Lewis, Robert Johnson. What do I mean by “real”? I defer to the great music journalist Stanley Booth, who wrote in 1968: “By now there must be in the world a million guitar virtuosos; but there are very few real blues players. The reason for this is that the blues — not the form, but the blues — demands such dedication. This dedication lies beyond technique; it makes being a blues player something like being a priest. Virtuosity in playing blues licks is like virtuosity in celebrating the Mass, it is empty, it means nothing. Skill — competence — is a necessity, but a true blues player's virtue lies in his acceptance of his life, a life for which he is only partly responsible.”
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
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