One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without...

In memoriam of Eoin French.

A musician died this week. 

His name is Eoin French.

He was 37. 

It was cancer that took him, and he passed peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by his closest in his native Ireland.

Eoin French made stunningly beautiful music under the name Talos, music that is uniquely powerful for our little family. It was to his songs that Kaitlin gave birth to our first son, Finn, an experience that remains the most primal and intense thing I’ve ever witnessed in what has been a rather intense life at times. I remember watching Kaitlin seemingly take strength from the billions of women who have given birth before her, and listening to Talos today brought that memory back in searing clarity.

This is what his music sounds like.

Eoin French died young. But he also brought and left glorious beauty in the world in his short life. As the poet Thomas Mordaunt once wrote - and deliberately paraphrased by me:  

“One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without...”

In a similar vein, Kazuo Ishiguro asks this question in his astounding Never Let Me Go: whether a long but barely lived life is better than a short one lived fully. 

“I was talking to one of my donors a few days ago who was complaining about how memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t see them ever fading.”

If your life was suddenly shorter than you imagined it would be, what beauty would you create, and what memories would you make? 

Eoin French, your music won’t fade for Kaitlin and I.