I never expected it to be that song.

Bruce Springsteen; sure. Bob Seger, maybe. At a stretch, perhaps I would have allowed for In The Blood by John Mayer.

But here I was, on the couch of my parent’s apartment, a month after my father had died, looking at a photo of him and crying to "Into The West" by Annie Lennox.

I’d taken the photo. It was after my father’s first round of chemo and radiation. He’s had to postpone a trip to Los Angeles he’d intended to make with my mother.

So when they rescheduled to come after his first recovery, I made big plans: Joshua Tree, the Redwoods up at the border between California and Oregon. I was going to show him some of the places I loved. Places that gave me grace and peace.

The photo in question had been taken in the small town of Crescent City. We’d just finished lunch at a brewery and spotted Battery Point Light. Pop was really keen to go see it, but it was a time of year where you couldn’t get to it.

So I drove up as close as I could get to it for him. We got out, while my mom and wife walked the dog, and I got him to stand with the lighthouse behind him.

When I look back at the picture now, the composition strikes me. There are layers: my father in the foreground, his blue sweater juxtaposed against the blue expanse above him. The green of the grass is pulled out of the picture because of all the blue.

The second layer is a calming eddy of water to his right. A sense of depth is helped by the rock in the middle of the water. You can actually see the ripple effect of it in the photo.

Then, beyond the water and the wall, a vast breadth of sky and sea. Rising out of it, on that craggy outcropping of rock speckled with green, sat the lighthouse. From that distance, the tree on it looked like a small bonsai. Like the whole thing was in a snow globe.

My father smiles in the picture.

The whole photo seems like a memory. The colors look hyper-real, like my old man is standing in what one might call "heaven."

So there I was on the couch, trying to sleep, with my wireless earbuds on. I was listening to a playlist I’d made. Songs about loss, moving on, death, and life. Think "Terry’s Song" from Springsteen, "All Things Must Pass" from George Harrison, a moving number called "A Dying Sailor to His Shipmates" by Bono.

And then "Into the West" came on. It was the words...

"Don’t say

We have come now to the end

White shores are calling

You and I will meet again

And you’ll be here in my arms

Just sleeping...

....What can you see

On the horizon?

Why do the white gulls call?

Across the sea

A pale moon rises

The ships have come to carry you home"

The words consumed me. I was taken back to when Pop was semi-conscious, and I told him it was OK to go. To head out to the next adventure awaiting him. How do you talk to your dying father when he is religious, and you are not? It’s not like I could tell him that I believed there was nothing after. He smiled and laughed when I whispered that to him.

So I let go, surrendered, and cried on the couch. I tried to remember all the things my therapist told me to work on. Leaning into emotion rather than running away from it. I thought about how sad my father would have been to know that my wife and I were separated. I thought about how he never got to see me be a successful writer in a public way.

Weeks later, I found myself sitting on the steps of my oceanfront villa in Goa, India. As I watched the final sunset over the Arabian Sea, as the wind passed through the trees, that song came on again.

I cried again. This time I surrendered my pain. I gave it over to the winds and resolved to just be. I finally understood the notion of being. There was nothing left to chase. I said goodbye to guilt, to shame, to self-loathing, to the ego.

I surrendered to whatever is to come.

And then, I started writing this collection.