Have you ever started listening to a song and then just broke into tears? Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t. But over on TikTok a new song by Jax came across my FYP (aka For You Page). It was from her newly released debut album, Dear Joe. The song that made me cry? Too young to be Old.
If you don’t know who Jax is, she’s a young songwriter who is rather well known over on TikTok, especially for her song, Victoria’s Secret. I really liked that song, but the one that knocked me over and makes me sob every time is the one she wrote for her father. And I am serious—I actually cry real tears when I start listening to that song. It triggers something in my heart.
Not sure if I was the audience Jax was going for, but I have a feeling it’s a demographic that might find itself crying along with me.
I’m a sixty-nine-year-old woman who, for over five years, was the full-time caretaker of her mother with vascular dementia, until Mom had to be moved into a memory care facility last year. Mom is 96, and I visit her every week, spending four or five hours with her each visit.
There is a line in Jax’s song that goes, “The hardest part of growing up is watching time take everyone you love.” When I hear that line, I think of Mom, and how all the people in her life have slipped away. Her father when she was a child, and in later years her mother, my father, her siblings, and most of her friends.
When she was still living with me, and not as lost in dementia as she is today, she would tell me how lonely she was, as most of her friends were gone, along with all her siblings and cousins. But the song also stirred emotions about my father.
My sister and I were daughters of a girl dad. I found the lines in Jax’s song poignant and relatable. There is one line about her father moving her into an apartment and assembling all her chairs. I remembered Dad moving me into my first apartment with my sister, and all the times he was there to put something together—not always furniture and sometimes metaphorically.
Jax’s line, “The hardest part of growing up is watching time take everyone you love,” didn’t just slam me in the gut because I thought of Mom’s losses. I thought of mine. Dad died over thirty years ago, with Mom and me by his bedside.
Her lyrics about her father’s aging and her wanting to deny it because she still needs him, took me back to my own experience dealing with my father’s illness and his subsequent death.
Her song made me think of both of my parents—losing my father, and the long painful goodbye of my mother. It reminded me of my own mortality, and how short life is. These days when my husband and I go onto Facebook there always seems to be news of another friend passing. In fact, next week we are attending the memorial service of a dear family member.
I urge you to check out Jax’s debut album. I would love for you to buy her music. She’s a talented young songwriter, and I’d like to see people support her, after all, she made me cry.
