It‘s hard for me to believe that there was ever a time in my life where I wasn't a Phil Collins fan. However, I probably never would have discovered him were it not for my Mom. It was the summer of 1999 and the Disney‘s Tarzan had just come out, and Mom was in the midst of her second bout with stage-four breast cancer.
Now I think it goes without saying, but for those of you who are unaware, stage four of any cancer pretty much means one thing: tell your family that you love them, and make arrangements for what‘ll happen when you‘re gone. Mom though, was the eternal optimist. It was her best feature really. Her oncologist would give her bad news, and she would smile; her crooked front teeth from where she never had braces as a girl would stick out and she would say ―I‘m going to be alright, because my kids need me. And no matter how weak she got she‘d just smile, bear through it, and take care of my sister and me before taking care of herself.
I envied her optimism. I used to lie awake at night in my Tarzan pajamas crying, certain that I‘d lose her. Well, she must have heard me one night because she came into my room and sang ―You’ll Be In My Heart” to me until I fell asleep. And from that night on until she went into remission that Christmas, she‘d come into my bedroom at night, and sing that song to me. When her cancer returned yet again in 2002, she knew how hard I was taking it, so she picked up the practice of coming to my room at night. Although this time we‘d sing the song together.
Now at the time I was too young to associate the song with anything but one of my favorite movies, and my Mom telling me that she‘d ―be there always. It was only later that I looked up the song and learned that Phil Collins was the man behind it, and by that point, I‘d discovered his other songs.
One night Mom came into my room and heard me listening to a Phil Collins playlist on my computer and she told me that he‘d been her favorite musician since she was a girl, and from then on whenever we were alone together we‘d listen to Phil Collins music. It was like a secret bond between the two of us that no one else in the house had, and no matter how rough things got between us (mostly due to my asshole teenage years) or for the family there was still this one thing that Mom and I had in common, that we both loved and could relate too.
Phil Collins officially retired from music in March of 2011, and in some dark cosmic twist of fate it was around the same time that Mom started feeling sick. In June of that year I was the one to drive her to her appointment with her oncologist. When she got back to the car I knew immediately that the prognosis was grim. This time it was in her ovaries, with tumors in her stomach and lungs. On the way home Fate, the cruel mistress that she is, deemed that ―You‘ll Be In My Heart would play on the radio.
Sure enough Mom started singing along, ―Come stop your crying it will be alright.
And I turned to her and grabbed her hand and sang, ―Just take my hand. Hold it tight.
About a year and a half later on January 5th, 2013 at 11:52 am she passed away. Her death certificate says her official cause of death is ―heart failure due to complications from chemotherapy. I was on my way to the hospital to tell her my final goodbye when Dad called me with the news. At that moment, Fate, the cruel mistress that she is, deemed that that ―You‘ll Be In My Heart would start play on the radio, as if Mom was singing it to me again; just as she did on all those nights when I was just a boy.
