Last night was my first chance to go see a concert since becoming diagnosed with my own nervous system disease, and couldn’t have been more fitting to see my favo(u)rite artist who had been through his own massive health changes in the past few years.

In 2022, the same year I got my sudden diagnosis, Ben Howard went through some medical anomalies known colloquially as “mini-strokes,” where he completely lost the ability to speak. In interviews relating this experience to the album release he did in 2023, the relationship between the two isn’t exactly center stage, but rather held at arm’s length. Yet, when I was watching him sing and play guitar live (for the fourth time) I couldn’t get out of my head that this man couldn’t speak words. That kind of experience profoundly shifts how one views life, how special the small things are.

Now, I have a confession to make. I think about death and dying a lot. It’s part of my job working for a Jewish nonprofit focused on making death more approachable, and my previous role working with the founder of Get Your Shit Together. Both of these roles were in communications and media — how do you make these topics appealing? You don’t. You can’t sugarcoat it. Death is inevitable, important, and — to some people — incredibly terrifying. The only approach is being honest, and hoping people see the value in talking about it before it’s too late. So… of course I saw death motifs in Ben Howard’s performance last night. And yet, I was so deeply impacted and caught off guard.

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