Sometimes people have a deep and lasting impact on your life and their death leaves an even more intense stamp on your heart.

Sometimes, and very rarely, these people are strangers to you.

A few weeks ago an incredible musician, Chris Cornell, died.

At the news of his death I felt knocked in the heart in the way my mind told me is only reserved for people who have been deeply interwoven in my life.

Because really, how can someone who we have never had a personal, face to face conversation with in our entire life have such a profound effect on our emotional state of being?

My brother (being 10 years older than me) introduced me to Chris Cornell’s music when hardly any girls I knew had ever heard of his name. I was drawn to the Seattle grunge music scene but wouldn’t have said that Soundgarden was my favourite band, or even that my teenage crush was Chris Cornell – I reserved Eddie Vedder for that.

The evening that Chris Cornell died I felt so silly that I found myself sitting in a puddle of tears.

Why was I feeling so much loss for someone I never knew?

The effect was so profound, so deep and aching in my heart that I needed to understand where it had come from.

I needed to find a place for the tears.

So I grabbed the thread that was hanging loosely in my heart and started to follow the trail.

Almost in an instant I was taken back to the teenage girl, struggling to find her place in a world that felt so foreign and messed up, and I was listening to a voice that was scoring my pain.

He gave voice to my pain.

He spoke of the things that I felt but didn’t yet have words for and he spoke of them with such honesty and conviction that I knew I could trust him to carry them for me.

He was taking the hurt and sending it off into his guitar riff so that I could come out the other side feeling clear.

Then suddenly it all made so much more sense.

I didn’t know Chris Cornell but his soul met mine many times, and I feel pretty sure that mine wasn’t the only soul that he visited.

Together we sat and I cried and his music told me that I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t alone.

So my tears are for an old friend who knew me in a way that not many other people did, and for the collective sadness that a generation of people feel in losing someone that has played a significant role at such a pivotal time in their lives.

Listening to his voice all these years later reminds me of a part of who I am, of where I’ve come from and who I have grown to be. Nostalgic emotion if you will.

The tears now feel beautiful and soaked with love as I realise that our greatest teachers and guides don’t ever have to be physically present in our lives for them to support us and hold us in times of need.

I hope my girls grow up to find musicians who speak to their souls in the way his did to mine.

I hope they uncover artists who see the world with eyes like their own.

Or maybe they’ll become those musicians and artists themselves.

The world knows we need them.

Journey well Chris, and thank you for sitting with me in my times of need.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgsg9xfsSoc

This song was the first Chris Cornell song I heard. He wrote Say Hello 2 Heaven as a tribute to his flatmate, Andrew Wood, after he died of a heroin overdose. (Wood was the lead singer of Mother Love Bone another Seattle grunge band.)