When Sue* logged into the grief support group that day, she saw a new face among the Zoom squares. The young woman introduced herself as Diana Wang, a medical student researching bereavement and music — in particular, how creating a music playlist might help with grief.
Did anyone want to be part of the project?
Like everyone in this particular support group, Sue had recently lost a life partner — in her case, her husband. Like everyone, she was just doing her best, moment by moment, to find her way through loss. Some days, she didn’t know where to put all the emotions swirling inside her.
This project, she thought, could be a way to let those emotions breathe.
She raised her hand.
*For privacy, this persona is an anonymous blend of several participant experiences.
“Music is so powerful for healing and reflection”
Music may seem like an unusual focus for a future doctor. But to Diana Wang, music will always be front and center. In some of her earliest memories, she is holding a violin. Since her teens, she’s been playing professionally, even appearing with ensembles like Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble.
Then, as a Harvard undergrad, she discovered her second love: medicine — in particular, neuroscience. By the time she entered Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, including a research concentration in medical humanities and ethics, she was determined to bring those passions together to understand the inner workings of music, the brain and healing. And she wanted to serve a population often overlooked in medicine: the family members of hospice patients.
“It’s understandable that physicians spend a lot of their energy on the person who is ill. But once that part of life is over, these families are often not cared for as well by the healthcare system as they could be,” Diana says.
Medical students at Brown must complete a three-year research project. For hers, Diana decided to investigate the impact of a “playlist of the grief journey.” It was partly inspired by her experience as a hospice volunteer in Washington D.C., playing violin for families and sensing how the music comforted them when words failed. She was also encouraged by the cancer fighter playlists she’d come across online, popular among cancer survivors. Here was a free, accessible activity — requiring nothing but an internet connection — that could offer bereaved individuals the benefits of music plus creativity, no musical training required.
For support, she reached out to HopeHealth, a long-time partner of Brown University and a leader in bereavement services. She asked for help connecting with HopeHealth’s grief support groups, and training from their experts on how to sensitively work with individuals who have recently lost someone.
“Music is so powerful for healing and reflection,” Diana told the team. “My hypothesis is that it can provide a different medium for processing the passing of a loved one.” HopeHealth readily signed on.
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“Well, I’ve been afraid of changing / ‘Cause I’ve built my life around you”
When Sue raised her hand that day in grief support group, she suspected that, like everything else about losing her husband, making a playlist about her grief could be painful.
“Music was such a huge part of my life with my husband. I knew it would make me aware of the emptiness his loss has left,” she says. “But I was choosing to take myself on this journey, and choosing gave me some control as opposed to just suddenly hearing the music on the radio or in a public setting like a store.”
She met with Diana one-on-one by Zoom, and they began. Diana asked Sue about herself, about her late husband, and about their relationship. She asked about the emotions that had defined Sue’s grief so far; sometimes, she pulled up an image of a “feelings wheel” to help.
Of course, the two women also talked about music: its role in Sue’s life with her husband; what its role might be in this next chapter; even new strategies for how to listen to music and discover new genres. Diana introduced Sue to Spotify, a free online music platform, and showed her how to search for songs, artists and genres to build her own playlist.
Finally, Diana asked Sue to identify a theme for her playlist. To her surprise, that came to Sue easily. Because amid the countless, sometimes contradictory feelings that swept through every minute of every day, there’d been one constant since her husband’s death:
Change.
Later that evening, in a quiet moment by herself, Sue pulled up Spotify and typed “change” into the search bar. She watched as song titles tumbled down the screen. When her eyes fell on “Landslide,” she clicked on a version by The Chicks, a band with a bluegrass vibe that she and her husband both loved. She closed her eyes and listened the way she and Diana had talked about — to how the instruments layered on top of one another; to how the rhythm synched up with her own heartbeat; to the way the music reflected the emotions inside of her.
The sad harmonies. The wistful guitar. The lyrics: “Well, I’ve been afraid of changing / ‘Cause I’ve built my life around you…” And amid all the heartache that the song captured, Sue recognized something else too: courage to face the unknown.
She added it to her playlist.
“This process made me feel deeply alive in a way I haven’t in months”
The grief playlist project is ongoing, as Diana enlists and meets with new volunteers. But the first wave of participants has already graduated and shared their feedback.
“This was a blessing,” one participant told her.
“It was a journey I value immensely,” said another.
For Diana, such testimonials have been gratifying personally. They’ve also been encouraging for her research, showing that music listening, paired with the creative act of building a personal playlist, seems to help people process grief. As one participant put it, “For me, the value in this was to concentrate and focus on memories that I might not have explored without this exercise.”
Someday, she hopes to teach this strategy to her fellow medical students, spreading awareness of the small but crucial ways physicians can support bereaved families.
In the meantime, she is grateful to make whatever difference she can for however many individuals she meets.
That includes Sue, whose playlist has grown from classics like “Landslide” to include newer songs like “Find Your People,” an homage to friends who are a bright spot in her grief. She listens to it in the car, and when she takes walks along the beach. It has become a way for her to turn into her grief when she feels up to it; a safe way to work through this complicated time. The highs, the lows, the loss, the love — it’s all there.
“This process made me feel deeply alive in a way I haven’t in months,” she says.