When the Soundtrack goes Missing

Disclaimer: This post reflects personal experience and personal reflection. It is shared for educational and reflective purposes only and is not medical, psychological, or grief counselling advice. Memory changes, trauma responses, and symptoms following head injuries can have many causes. If you are struggling with memory loss, unresolved grief, emotional distress, or possible concussion-related issues, please consider speaking with a qualified healthcare or mental health professional.

There is something strange about memory.

Sitting here tonight, listening to music from the 1980s, I am realizing just how much of that time feels blurred out. Not all of it. Some songs land exactly where they should. Some names, some sounds, some moments are still there. But a good stretch of it—maybe a year before my brother’s death, and a year or two after—just feels fractured. Like part of the soundtrack is missing.

And the more I sit with that, the more I think maybe it is not as mysterious as it first feels.

Trauma does that.

The death of my brother did not just take a person. It altered the landscape around the memory. Add to that my motorcycle accident, what was probably a pretty severe concussion that never really got properly followed through, the eyesight problems afterward, nearly ending up with a detached retina, and it starts to make a little more sense why those years feel scrambled.

Before the accident, I read constantly. And I mean constantly. From about grade 8 to grade 10 or so, I probably tore through somewhere in the neighbourhood of 150 novels. Series, standalone books, science fiction, fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction—I devoured them. David Robbins. Stephen R. Donaldson. Anne McCaffrey. Marion Zimmer Bradley. Piers Anthony. Robert Heinlein. John Wyndham. Those books were not just entertainment. They were territory. They were refuge. They were one of the places where my mind actually belonged to me.

After the accident, that changed. Some of that was probably physical. Some of it was probably circumstance. Some of it was simply life shifting under my feet. The motorcycle became a car. I was out more. The rhythm changed. But I do wonder now how much of that loss of reading was not just about growing older or getting busier, but about what trauma and injury can quietly take from you without announcing themselves.

Psychologically, that kind of disruption matters. When the brain is overwhelmed—by grief, shock, injury, stress—it does not always store memory cleanly. It does not catalogue life like a neat bookshelf. It triages. It keeps what seems necessary for survival and lets other pieces fall into shadow. That does not mean those years did not matter. It means the system was overloaded.

Sociologically, there is another layer to it too. Memory is not built in a vacuum. It is tied to power, routine, environment, and whose preferences get to dominate the room. Even before Stephen died, I did not get a lot of time with my own music. What we listened to was usually what he wanted to listen to. His tastes carried the day. Mine did not. He leaned toward Kiss, April Wine, Chilliwack, Def Leppard, Foreigner, Queen. All solid bands. No disrespect there. But that was not where my center of gravity was. I was more Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, heavier stuff, darker stuff, more edge to it.

And that kind of thing sounds small until you think about it properly. Music is not just background noise. It is identity. It is emotional territory. It is one of the ways we mark time and claim space. When your choices are constantly pushed aside in favour of somebody else’s, even in ordinary family life, your own soundtrack can start to feel secondary. Then grief hits, trauma hits, injury hits, and suddenly whole chunks of memory feel like they belong to somebody else’s life more than your own.

Maybe that is part of what I am hearing now when I listen to some of these songs. Not just nostalgia. Not just loss. But absence. Missing ownership. Missing continuity. Missing pieces.

And maybe that is worth saying out loud, because sometimes we judge ourselves for what we cannot remember, or for the parts of ourselves that seemed to disappear after certain events. We act like it means we were careless, weak, distracted, broken. But sometimes it just means too much happened at once. Sometimes it means the mind did what it could with what it had.

I still miss the reader I used to be.

I still wonder who I might have been if that accident had not happened, if the grief had not hit when it did, if those years had unfolded differently.

But maybe part of rebuilding is not demanding a perfect archive from yourself. Maybe part of rebuilding is simply noticing what is missing, naming why it might be missing, and refusing to turn that missing space into self-contempt.

Sometimes the soundtrack goes quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with not caring.

Sometimes survival is noisy enough that memory never gets a clean recording.

Godspeed.