As Slumber Pulls You Down
Just lay down
And let your worries sleep
Don’t think now
Of waters dark and deep
Taylor Hanson, 24, of Mounds, died Saturday, September 22, 2007, at his residence.
He was born March 14, 1983 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was the son of Walker and Diana (Lawyer) Hanson. Taylor was best known as a member of world famous pop rock band Hanson which rose to popularity in 1997 with their hit song Mmmbop. The band released their fourth studio album, The Walk, on their label 3CG in July.
Taylor was preceded in death by his grandparents Clyde and Jane Lawyer and Clarke and Bea Hanson, all of Tulsa.
In addition to his parents, Taylor is survived by three brothers, Isaac Hanson, Zachary Hanson and Mackenzie Hanson; three sisters, Jessica Hanson, Avery Hanson and Zoe Hanson; sister-in-law Nikki (Dufresne) Hanson and nephew Everett Hanson, all of Tulsa and Mounds.
The family wishes to express their deepest appreciation to all of Taylor’s physicians, nurses, medical teams, Cancer Treatment Center of Tulsa, employees and partners of 3CG and all fans of Hanson everywhere around the world. They thank everyone who knew and loved Taylor for all they did to let him know he was cared for and thought of during his struggles. Each and every act of kindness, love and generosity will never be forgotten by the family. Taylor was truly grateful for all the love he was shown throughout his life.
The family will receive friends from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm and from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm, on Tuesday, September 25, at Moore Funeral Home in Tulsa. They ask that fans please do not attend this private funeral.
A memorial service open to any and all Hanson fans will be held at Cain’s Ballroom on September 31.
Interment is in Memorial Park in Tulsa. Pallbearers include Isaac Hanson, Zachary Hanson, Wade Sommers, Jonny Wright, Joe Wright, Josh Wright, Jacob Wright, Jeremy Wright and Ashley Greyson.
In lieu of flowers or other gifts, the family requests that contributions be made to the band’s Take The Walk charity which will benefit mothers and children in developing countries.
The funeral service was beautiful, but it wasn’t Taylor. Even at the end, he hadn’t really become much of an organized religion sort of person. Taylor believed in people and music; that was his religion. Sitting in a stuffy church full of people in black… that wasn’t Taylor and I couldn’t feel him there. I wanted to know that he was still there with us in some way, if there was such a thing as spirits. But his spirit wasn’t in that church.
As soon as I walked in Cain’s for the memorial service, I felt Taylor all around.
Isaac and Zac had declined to play or sing at the event. Diana had been the only one to sing at his funeral, a beautiful a capella version of Let it Be. Zac confided in me that it just felt wrong to sing without Taylor and that he didn’t know if the two of them would ever try to perform on their own, but he was certain they would never perform as Hanson again.
Even though it wasn’t Hanson, Cain’s was full of music that night. Friends and fellow musicians from all over Tulsa and even a few from the rest of the country had shown up to pay their respects to Taylor with all genres of music. There was hardly a moment of silence the entire night. This was how I wanted to remember Taylor—with joy and singing.
There were tears shed, too, of course. Fans packed the building and flooded out into the street, causing a minor panic on the part of the cops who were providing security. I almost wondered if every Hanson fan in the state had shown up, and I was certain I heard a few foreign accents, too.
I blended into the crowd almost entirely. I heard a few whispers and saw a few stares, but everyone left me alone, whether they knew I was the grieving girlfriend or not. I kind of liked the anonymity. I knew who I was, and I knew Taylor loved me. That was enough. The rest of the world didn’t need to know me. If they saw his ring on my finger, that was all the answer they would get as to my identity.
Everyone wanted me to speak at the memorial, since I hadn’t at the funeral, but I couldn’t do it. My thoughts about and feelings for Taylor were mine, not the world’s. Compared to everything else he’d given of himself, there wasn’t much of him that was mine and mine alone. What precious little I had would stay mine. I had no words to share with anyone. I left the talking to Isaac and Zac.
When the crowd became too much for me to handle, I made my way backstage and found Nikki. She’d set up camp in a secluded dressing room where she could sit and nurse Everett when she needed to, and that was exactly the sort of privacy I needed right then, too.
“How’s it going out there?” She asked.
“Good,” I replied. “I mean, it’s weird to say you’re having fun at something like this, you know? But the music is good, and it just feels… right. This feels like what Taylor would have wanted. God, that’s such a cheesy thing to say.”
“Everything people say after someone dies is cheesy. I mean, how many times have you heard someone say they were ‘sorry for your loss?’”
“Enough to last me a lifetime,” I replied.
We lapsed into silence as Nikki continued to nurse Everett. After a few moments, she said softly, “I really don’t know how you can keep going, though. I’m not judging you or anything, I just keep thinking about what it would be like for me… I think I would go crazy.”
“I think I was crazy to begin with,” I replied with a forced laugh. “It would be different for you now. It was just me and Taylor, you know? And in a lot of ways, it’s been just me and him for a long time. Even when we weren’t together… we’ve just always had this weird bond, and that’s not the sort of thing that just goes away. I didn’t lose that when we weren’t together, and I haven’t lost it now. That… that helps, I guess.”
Nikki nodded. “You were in love. You both were.”
“As if I haven’t been cheesy enough already… it was even more than just love, I think. I don’t know what to call it. We just… knew each other. Inside and out.”
Something in those words opened the floodgates. I had shed a few tears here and there over the last few days, but none that even rivaled the tears I cried when Taylor had broken my heart years ago. Right then, though, something in me broke and the tears began to pour. Nikki sat Everett down gently and fixed her dress, then pulled me into her arms. It didn’t take long before my tears became contagious and we were both sobbing. We had to look crazy, sitting in a dressing room crying as some band played a loud cover of Only The Good Die Young, but I didn’t care and I didn’t think she cared either.
I could say all I wanted about how Taylor was a part of me, but he was gone. He had only officially been mine for a year and now he was gone. I could feel him in my heart and soul all I wanted, but I would never see him again, never hear his voice again…
He was just gone.
In the months after Taylor’s death, I threw myself into what was now my work. Since I had been there through the planning of it, I became a big part of running Take The Walk. The record company’s office became the charity’s office too, and it was where I spent most of my days and more than a few of my nights. The pool house felt like I was living in a coffin. Sometimes at night, I swore that the bed shifted under someone else’s weight. I didn’t sleep much those nights. The only way I could keep myself sane was to become a workaholic and insomniac.
While I ran the charity side of things, Isaac and Zac threw themselves into writing and producing for other bands. It was as close to the music business as I knew either of them felt comfortable getting. We all spent a lot of time at the office, just to keep ourselves busy and occupy our minds with thoughts other than Taylor, I think.
A thought had been brewing in my mind for a while, and after making a few phone calls, I found Zac in the studio and asked if he could draw a set of angel wings for me. He seemed confused, but he agreed to do it.
He brought me the finished drawing right before he and Isaac were about to leave for lunch. It was exactly what I had imagined—a small, dainty pair of wings.
“Actually…” I said. “If you’re not busy, do you think maybe you could come with me? We can still get lunch afterward, but I’d… I’d kinda like to have someone with me.”
“Sure,” Zac replied, still looking utterly perplexed by all of my requests.
Nevertheless, he followed me to my car and sat silently in the passenger seat as we drove a few blocks away. I parked in front of a tattoo parlor and watched as Zac’s expression turned from confusion to something that almost resembled understanding.
As we sat inside and waited for the last minute appointment I’d been lucky to make, I clutched the drawing in my hand. Zac still seemed confused, his eyes darting around to look at all the flash art on the walls.
“A tattoo, huh?” He asked. “That’s what I drew for you?”
“Yeah. It was, umm, an idea Taylor had, actually. A few years ago, we were talking about tattoos, and he had this idea… wings and an apple, something about good and evil. Temptation. I always thought he should get the wings, and I should get the apple, because I was always the weak one, giving in to temptation. I never told him that, though. But I’ve been thinking… I know there’s still plenty of him that I carry around with me, but this just feels like something I need to do. Something permanent, so everyone can see that he’s under my skin. Literally. You didn’t know it, but I think you got the size just right. I want it on my left hip.”
Zac nodded. He understood the significance—that was the site of Taylor’s last tumor.
A short hour later, I left the tattoo parlor with a tiny pair of wings on my hip in shades of gray. It hurt, but I didn’t care. I’d felt plenty of pain over Taylor, and I was certain I would continue to feel plenty more. I would never be rid of him and the things he made me feel, and I didn’t want to be.
On the one year anniversary of Taylor’s death, I went to his grave for the first time since the funeral. I knew the fans flocked to it, leaving so many gifts that it reminded me of photos I’d seen of Jim Morrison’s final resting place. Taylor’s grave was their place, not mine. I could remember Taylor anywhere else; I didn’t need to visit some patch of grass.
Zac felt the same, but he talked me into going with him on the anniversary. We carpooled, since we were going home to the same apartment. He knew how much living in the pool house killed me, but that I didn’t have anywhere else to go other than back to my dad’s house, so he offered to split the rent on an apartment with me. I was pretty sure he didn’t split it entirely down the middle, since even my job at 3CG didn’t pay nearly enough to put me on his financial level, but I never called him out for it.
At the grave, I didn’t say anything. Taylor knew I loved him. What more was there for me to say? I just couldn’t make the sort of tearful speech that people in movies made. That wasn’t my style. I just stood there, letting my tears fall onto the ground, staring at all the cards, flowers and stuffed animals decaying into the ground.
Gifts still poured in at the office, despite numerous pleas to just donate that money. A big part of my job was organizing for most of those gifts to be donated. Most of them were sent to childrens’ hospitals, in the hopes of brightening the day of some young person suffering the same sort of disease that took Taylor’s life.
When I wasn’t working on organizing all the various charity operations we had going on, I was pouring through Taylor’s journals. It wasn’t an easy task, since a lot of his entries spoke of me. I could see laid out clearly in front of me just how many of his songs were about me. Snippets of real conversations I remembered having with him were recorded on some pages, forming the dialogue of bits and pieces of fictional stories he’d never finished.
Over the last year, a lot of his writing had been devoted to what he’d seen in Africa, and during his last few practically bedridden months, he’d been working on a book about it. We were set to release that in just a few days, along with the last few recordings the band had ever made, including a studio recording of Change In My Life that brought me to tears the one and only time I’d been strong enough to listen to it. I wasn’t sure what was more chilling—reading Taylor’s words or listening his voice. Both were like seeing a ghost.
The more I read his journals, the more a new idea formed in my mind—a book of his writing. All of the songs, poems and bits of prose that might have otherwise never seen the light of day. Some of it was so personal that I blushed reading it, and I knew those pages should never be released to the public. But even in death, Taylor still had so much left to give the world. I was tired of keeping so many parts of him to myself. He wasn’t just mine. He was so much more than that, so much bigger than any of the labels that could be applied to him.
Maybe that was why he couldn’t live any longer. There was just too much of him, too much life for one person, so he had to be robbed of it. That was the only way I could rationalize his death, as though death could be rationalized at all. Death just happened, even to people who seemed larger than life and barely even human, like Taylor.
That still didn’t make it okay, and I still cried most days. Zac cried at night. I could hear him through the apartment’s thin walls. Sometimes neither of us could sleep, and we would sit up watching late night television until we passed out on the couch together. The nights when we ended up in the same bed, just holding each other silently until we finally drifted off as the sun rose, seemed to be increasing in frequency. We rarely spoke of Taylor, but I’m sure he was in Zac’s thoughts as much as he was in mine. It would have felt like a horrible betrayal not to think of him constantly. On the few days I did make it through without shedding a tear, there would inevitably be some reminder of him that felt like a shot to the gut. How could I forget him? How could I, for even one second, think life could be normal and okay without Taylor in it? How could I be so heartless?
But I wasn’t. I was just human. I was still alive and I had to keep living, somehow. Taylor had once called me stoic, but I didn’t think he would say that if he could see me now. Most of the time I was just a mess. I did what I had to do to get through the day, but I wasn’t happy. All I had wanted for years was to know that Taylor loved me, and once I learned it, once I felt that love… it was taken from me. It seemed like a cruel joke.
Maybe that love was like Taylor. It was too big to last. Most of the time, even when he was still here but we weren’t together, it felt more like pain than love. I just felt so much for him that it seemed it would come bursting out of my body at any moment. That sort of thing couldn’t be safe. It was the sort of thing that didn’t seem real, just something you see in movies. Soul mates? Twins souls? I don’t know. Maybe. All I knew was that Taylor and I had a love that defied definition, defied any sort of normal relationship… defied even death.
I didn’t know, at just twenty five, if I would ever really love again, but it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be what I felt for Taylor. Nothing else would ever compare to that. No one else would ever be Taylor, and I would never again be the person I was when he was in my life. If there was a part of me in all of his songs, then there was a part of him in everything I was and everything I would do and be for the rest of my life.
Cause you know that I’ll love you
And never let go
And you know
That I’ll love you forever
I’ll love you and never let go
Yes I’ll love you and never let go