Singing the Blues and Finding Harmony Again
By Scott Patrick McGowan
Life doesn’t come wrapped in a neat little package with guarantees. It can be messy and throw us curveballs.
One came my way on Aug. 18, 2017, when the unthinkable happened. With no known heart condition, my wife and business partner, Harlene, collapsed and died of sudden cardiac arrest.
We founded and managed a music school for 20 years that employed dozens of traveling instructors who provided weekly lessons in the homes of upwards of 200 and 300 students for the vast majority of those years.
It all started in early 1993, about six months after my mother’s untimely passing. I had spent nearly four-and-a-half years working with developmentally disabled children and adults following my graduation from the University of Delaware with a psychology degree.
I decided to become a freelance traveling piano teacher and professional musical entertainer in nursing homes.
Later that fall, I met Harlene through a personal ad and we wed in May of 1994. In early 1996, I convinced her to quit her sales job and join me in teaching piano by taking students on my waiting list. She continued to fill her schedule and when a joint waiting list developed — at her urging — we expanded our business in 1997.
Now without warning, I was left with a business that heavily depended on our finely tuned partnership, synergy and shared vision … and our 18-year-old son, Stephen, whom we adopted from Siberia back in 2000.
Unexpected widowhood in middle-age is an overwhelming experience. Now five years later, while I can still attest to what an unimaginable and profoundly painful life-changing event I endured, I also never imagined how beautiful life could become again.
We suffer and face seemingly insurmountable challenges in life but the resilience of the human spirit typically triumphs, and we are transformed and blessed by the miracle of healing. And ultimately, we hopefully grow deeper, wiser and more compassionate. Each of us has the ability to become like a Phoenix rising.
After losing Harlene that tragic Friday morning, being an unusually extroverted person with many Facebook connections, I made a simple, shocking post and pleaded for visitors. Within 48 hours, more than 80 people showed up. Friends began organizing everything from meals and visiting hours for 10 days to Harlene’s cremation and a beautiful outdoor memorial service at a private home.
I began using Facebook to share my progress to allow in-person socializing to be a reprieve from my grief, and I connected with a counselor who has walked with me on what has become an amazing journey.
Healing became a balancing act of staying active without trying to fully escape from my grief, yet not allowing my grief to consume me when spending time alone reflecting and attending to it. When I connected with the pain — and even leaned into it — the waves of grief slowly began to dissipate as the months passed.
Significant milestones were reached when I started to play the piano again, returned to sleeping in our bed, went through her belongings and rearranged our bedroom.
The proof of my first book arrived just two days before my shocking loss. In March of 2018, I picked it up and completed the final edits and proceeded to write a second book I finished that July.
Continuing to sing karaoke weekly proved to have an ameliorative effect in the months following my loss. As I proceeded in my writing, I decided to find other karaoke venues, with the intention of making new friends. It helped to spend more time doing something I enjoyed and to widen my circle of friends to include people who never knew my late wife.
These outings provided a new environment in which her absence was no longer the white elephant in the room, facilitating an important step in my healing and conceding to my new identity as “single.”
By the summer of 2019, my ambition for heading up an entire music school never resurfaced. A new era dawned in my professional life when I decided to allow the employment arm of my music school to gradually unwind and begin maximizing my own teaching schedule.
I also chose to short-sell the collaboratively and uniquely artistically appointed home we had shared for nearly 10 years and where we had hosted numerous memorable social gatherings.
Then in late September, serendipity brought an acquaintance, Kathy, and I together. Not long after we became a couple, I scattered the remainder of Harlene’s ashes on the anniversary of the day we first met, physically letting go on the same date she had entered my life. Since fulfilling my promise to Harlene to find love again, a reinvented life has been fully realized.
My first two books, self-published on Amazon and consisting of creative, pun-filled fictional stories, have evolved into a five-volume series. I also wrote two children’s books, the second of which Kathy illustrated and the first of which was featured on a WJZ-TV.
More ambitiously, last summer I wrote an autobiography that not only details my journey through widowerhood but candidly explores another deeply painful issue related to my family of origin from which I have also found deep healing and bold liberation.
In connection with that, I plan to educate and empower others through a YouTube channel I launched in August.
When building my personal teaching schedule, the pandemic began and required that my staff and I, and our students, utilize remote platforms. I still actively promote that option and currently have a schedule of nearly 40 students — mostly remote — with a goal of 50 students, while my remaining staff of three instructors work with 10 students.
Kathy and I were happily wed on June 26, 2022, with about 180 in attendance, and enjoyed a seven-night honeymoon in Cancun. Wedding guests included my late wife’s family, with whom I stay in fairly regular touch, as well as my beloved late mother’s two brothers — with whom I reconnected in 2020. They have brought back into my life the refreshing kind of positive older male role models that fit well into my vision of what family should be.
And with what my counselor deems excellent mental health, since my sessions were all related to circumstances, I am graduating from his services.
Yes, life can throw curve balls. But with patience and quiet determination, we can eventually get into the swing of a whole new game.