The Days Between

There are Two Dates on Your Tombstone. What Will You do With the Days Between.

If you have followed me on social media or subscribed to my Substack, you’re doubtless aware that I am a longtime Deadhead. So much so, in fact, that I have the tiger emblem from Jerry Garcia’s custom Doug Irwin guitar (pictured above) tattooed on my left tricep.

I first came across the Grateful Dead while thumbing through my parents’ album collection in the basement of the house I grew up in. Nestled among the Carly Simon, Neil Young, Cat Stevens, and Chicago Transit Authority records were copies of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

The two albums, recorded six months apart in 1970, marked the Grateful Dead’s shift from their blues and psychedelic rock beginnings to a rootsy style of Americana that defined their sound for the next 25 years. From the first moment the needle dropped on “Box of Rain,” I was hooked, and the tapestry of characters and themes that the lyrics brought to life continue to speak to me decades later.

Like any Deadhead, I get a little sentimental in July and August as the anniversaries of their last show, Brent Mydland’s death and Jerry Garcia’s death fall one after the other. Deadheads refer to this week as The Days Between – a reference to the time between Garcia’s birthday on August 1, 1942 and his death on August 9, 1995.

“Days Between” is also the name of one of the last anthems that emerged from Garcia’s songwriting partnership with Robert Hunter.  Written in 1993, the song is autobiographical in a sense.  It is written from the perspective of a man in his last few chapters who recalls the sighs of young passion in the springtime, fears the dark horsemen in the fall, and longs nostalgically across the impassable chasm of time for those precious and fleeting days between.

By any measure, Garcia squeezed every drop out of his short life. By the time of his death at the age of 53, he had spent 30 years on the road with the Grateful Dead, playing more than 2,300 shows as well as hundreds of other gigs with his various side projects and collaborations like the Jerry Garcia Band, Old and in The Way, New Riders of the Purple Sage and Legion of Mary.

I discovered Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations a few years after the Grateful Dead, but like their music, the emperor’s words struck a particular chord in my soul, speaking to me about the meaning of life and how to live it well.

While the Garcia songbook often focused on risk taking, free living and down-on-their luck outcasts and outlaws, Marcus wrote about his practice of the Stoicism in his journals, filling volumes with his private thoughts on issues such as change, life, death, discipline, pleasure, fame, and reason. But as with many of Garcia’s songs, such as “Days Between,” Marcus’ words were written from the perspective of a man in the twilight of his life.

As a Stoic, Marcus divided life into two categories: that which he controlled and that which he did not. Disease and betrayal and death were natural and uncontrollable, and so the goal of life became to live it with virtue in the face of such hardships - especially as he approached its end.

Like Garcia, Marcus died young, at age 58. Death, from a Stoic perspective, was not a threat, but a natural part of the human experience. And as Marcus approached his final days he thought of the end regularly, reminding himself that it was not final, but transitory:

"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life."

So too, perhaps Garcia, who by the time he performed his last show on July 9, 1995, had begun to play slower and longer dirges in place of the band’s upbeat favorites. His mindset was obvious during that last show and though “Days Between” didn’t make the setlist, the Dead played songs that covered similar ground.

First there was “So Many Roads,” a sad coda to the journey of life and the many paths that one can take. And then came the encore with Garcia leading the band on the deeply Stoic “Black Muddy River,” a song he had once told Rolling Stone was “about the perspective of age and making a decision about the necessity of living in spite of a rough time, and the ravages of anything else that's going to come at you.”

“Box of Rain,” written by bassist Phil Lesh, ended the show with the last line, “Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there,” providing the fitting finale to the endless tour.

Worn out from touring, strung out from addiction and suffering from diabetes, Garcia walked off the stage in Chicago and checked into a California rehab in early August where he would die of a heart attack a few days later. I learned of his death on the radio when the news came across at a top of the hour break on WBLM (The Rock N’ Roll Blimp - IYKYK). It was little more than a passing moment between the sports and weather.

There were days.

And there were days.

And there were days between.

In the end there are only two days on our tombstones. What Garcia and Marcus Aurelius remind me is that what truly matters, is not the time you have, but what you do with those days between.

Out of Role!