Piano Lessons

Coping with life, loss, and what you shouldn’t do if you find the corpse of your daughter’s piano teacher in the living room

My daughter has been taking piano lessons for just over a year, and, at some point, I’m pretty sure I’m going to find a corpse in her teacher’s apartment. This isn’t to say that Marty, short for Martha, is a psychopath with a bunch of left feet in her freezer or that she even suffers from some sort of terminal condition. Marty’s just getting on in years. I’m not really sure how many years exactly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was old enough to have voted for Warren G. Harding.

To complicate matters, Marty is also a bit hard of hearing. It doesn’t sound like much of a problem, but it could be. Being aware that she’s not so great at hearing things, Marty encourages everyone to walk on into her apartment unannounced. More often than not, Marty’s in the middle of a lesson or cooking up something in her kitchen that smells an awful lot like a Grateful Dead concert. Other times, she’s nowhere to be found, and I’m left to assume that she’s indisposed or suffering from a cardiac event. To date, Marty’s always returned from wherever it is that she’s gone — just where exactly is another mystery, because the apartment isn’t that large — but that doesn’t mean she always will.

I’ve steeled myself for the possibility that one of these days my daughter will show up for a piano lesson and receive an entirely different one instead.

“What’s wrong with Mrs. Marty?” my daughter will ask.

“Well, old people get tired,” I’d say, “she’s probably just taking a nap.”

“In the middle of the living room? With her eyes open?”

“Yep,” I’d nod enthusiastically, “She probably thought that sleeping on the floor was good for her back and lots of people sleep with their eyes open,” I’d say, and then quickly shepherd my daughter to the car.

I’d call 911 once my daughter is seated in front of the TV back home and move into the kitchen to talk to the dispatcher.

“What’s the address, sir?” I’d hear on the other end of the phone and then realize that I don’t know Marty’s address. She lives in a complex of townhomes, and each one looks pretty much like the other. I’m not sure if they even have numbers, but if they do, I haven’t noticed them after two years.

“Errrr…it’s the one just past the Subaru dealership,” I’d tell the dispatcher, “but I’m not sure what the number is. Maybe seven? If you look inside the front window, you can see a piano. The rest of the living room looks like a massage parlor from the old West.”

“Thank you, sir,” the dispatcher would say, “we have other, more intelligent and less self-absorbed people who have called in for Marty. She taught my son how to play Fur Elise and, for the record, her address is 109 Maple Street, Apartment 12. Not that you’ll need it anymore.”

It’s a morbid thought, but death has become a more frequent and, frankly, unwelcome visitor the older I’ve gotten. It’s all well and good and perhaps even healthy to consider it a part of life, but that’s not a concept I can really get behind. Despite my feelings on the subject, however, I’ve passed some transitional point in my life where dying has become less of an abstract idea and more of an inevitability.

A college friend of mine died from a heart defect at the age of 24, clearly and happily an anomaly in this day and age. A high school classmate passed away a few years ago from a similar issue. I grieved a bit upon learning that they’d died, but, more than anything, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief that it wasn’t me on the slab.

I’ve witnessed the passing of my father-in-law and his father as well. Even more recently, an uncle of mine slipped into the great beyond. His passing hit me quite hard, actually, and I realized that I may have come to an age where life has started taking away more things than it will bless me with.

Marty, I’m sure, has had the same thoughts, but despite her age, she doesn’t seem to be overwhelmed by them. Every week that we open her door Marty seems to be genuinely happy to see my daughter, and it’s probably not because we’re paying $25.00 for a lesson.

“Well, look who it is!” she exclaims in a raspy voice that belies a lifetime of cigarettes smoked some many, many years ago. Not for the first time, I think that if Marty could dress as anything for Halloween, I’m sure she’d be a Flapper from the 1920s.

“I love the way you play!” she tells my daughter, “now let’s try Good King Wencell…Good King Wences…ces…damnit, I could never pronounce his name, but you know the one, honey.”

In addition to being a marvelous teacher, Marty is also an accomplished pianist. During the recital last year, she opted to open the show herself.

“I broke my middle finger,” she said before sitting down at the piano, “so I’m going to be playing with nine fingers. We’ll see how it goes.”

To finish the story just click through to Piano Lessons on Medium!

About the Author

derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.