Music Shows the Power of a Father’s Lament

My first child was born after midnight on a Thursday in August. As a daily newspaper reporter at the time, I had a camera handy and was taking close mental notes. We have images of the boy’s blood-smeared body in the doctor’s gloved hands. He came in a rush: eyes closed, his face a tiny pink grimace. I remember that slap on his little buttocks, then that sharp, piercing cry—an explosive wail. The doctor let me cut the cord.

Later, I walked by the windows alongside the nursery. I saw a nurse putting my swaddled son into a clear plastic bassinet. That’s when it hit me. I was a dad.

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Deep joy and exhilaration. But underneath was a somber pathos. This boy, I knew, would one day be there when my eyes closed for the last time. And as I looked out into the years ahead for him, I sensed my utter inability. How was I to be who he needed me to be as a father? No book, no tutorial, no sage advice seemed enough.

Biblical Lament

There are many reasons why it’s hard to be a dad. Chief is the unique helplessness it brings. Even the most successful and well-intentioned fathers live in some measure of lament—a soul cry that’s entirely biblical and sometimes devastating.

Fathers grieve the lack of control we have over that little (yet so enormous) life—in the cradle, in the playpen, in the classroom, in the dorm room, in the apartment, at the wedding ceremony, at the graveside. Some of the most poignant fatherly laments come from those who see suffering in their children, who experience pain in their marriage as a result of children’s travails, or who have lost children.

Scripture is full of fathers whose laments are part of God’s teaching about men in families.

Scripture is full of fathers whose laments are part of God’s teaching about men in families.

Abraham’s lament was silent as he climbed the mountain with the son God had told him to kill. “God will provide for himself the lamb,” he told Isaac quietly (Gen. 22:8).

Jacob lamented the fury of his two sons who had butchered so many in Shechem after the rape of their sister (34:30). David’s loud mourning for the rebellious Absalom was so powerful it rocked the nation, and one of his generals rebuked him for it (2 Sam. 18:33; 19:1–6). Job’s lament—one that involves lost children—takes up most of the 42 chapters in the book named for him (Job 1:18–19).

Lament is part of the human experience. For some who reject God or don’t know him, it can arise from anger—at the Creator, at the world as they’ve experienced it, at themselves. But in the Bible, arising from believers, it can be proof of our relationship with God, like a child asking “Why?” or “How long?” to a dad she trusts.

Music as a Means of Lament

Fatherly lament shows up in popular music.

Father songwriters lament many things. It might be their often clunky quest to be effective mentors to their children (e.g., “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin, about a too-busy dad) or a lament over a child’s long illness (e.g., “Possibilities” by Darius Rucker, written by a father watching his son battle leukemia). Or it might be lament over how a pursuit of extramarital romance destroyed the trust of a father’s family (e.g. in “4:44,” Jay-Z admits his infidelity to wife Beyoncé, saying, “If my children knew, I don’t know what I would do”).

Other laments are tied to grief over lost children. Most of TobyMac’s album Life After Death is a cry to God about his son Truett McKeehan (“TruDog”), who entered eternity after an accidental fentanyl overdose. In the song “21 Years,” the sorrowful father laments his all-too-brief time with his son: “21 years makes a man full grown; 21 years what a beautiful loan.” TobyMac told a broadcast interviewer that his last text from his son contained the words “You always made me feel like a superhero.” We weep with him.

Steven Curtis Chapman, another Christian music artist, lost a child to a terrible accident in 2008. In his 2009 album, Beauty Will Rise, Chapman puts his fatherly grieving process to song. Eric Clapton’s life as a dad forever changed when, in 1991, his 4-year-old fell out of an accidentally open window in a 53rd-story apartment. We feel Clapton’s fatherly soul pain in “Tears in Heaven.”

Music can also provide catharsis for fathers seeking to learn from the mistakes of previous generations in their own fatherhood journeys. In his “Happy Father’s Day,” Christian rapper Shai Linne poignantly works through “emotions trapped in silence locked deep in [his] heart” related to his estranged father.

The pain of fathers and children goes both ways. Plenty of pop music’s laments come from offspring crying out over fathers who left or neglected them. We hear it in the Temptations’s “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” Neil Young’s “Old Man,” Everclear’s “Father of Mine,” and Frank Turner’s “Father’s Day,” to name a few. Some fathers’ laments are tied up with the fact that they caused pain and lament in their children.

Some fathers’ laments are tied up with the fact that they caused pain and lament in their children.

But not all fatherly lament arises out of sin, parental failure, or death. Sometimes it comes from the reality of children’s natural progression in life. Kids leave home to return rarely or never. Cory Asbury’s “These Are the Days” is a recent example of this universal lament over parenthood’s brevity: “Tell ‘em bed time stories / Give ‘em a kiss good night / Darlin’ before we know it / This old house will be quiet.”

The prevalence of fatherly lament in music—across so many genres and eras—shows how universal this feeling is for dads. And the popularity of these songs shows how cathartic it is for others to see these emotions publicly expressed. We can feel alone in our emotions until we see others give voice to their emotions in beautiful, relatable ways. This is and always has been one of the profound purposes of the arts and humanities. They facilitate connection between humans by sparking universal resonance from the particular experiences of life’s joys and struggles.

Laments Take Courage but Bring Healing

There’s a scene in the 1983 film Tender Mercies where a father, an acclaimed singer-songwriter who’d never been able to talk deeply with his daughter, comes to her casket after she’d been killed in a drunk driving accident. Just before her death, she’d asked him to play “Wings of a Dove,” a gospel song about Jesus’s love. He couldn’t do it. And she left sad, feeling alone. Now, facing the girl’s closed casket, and in a hushed tone, he begins, slightly off-key, “On the wings of a snow-white dove / He sends his pure sweet love—a sign from above, on the wings of a dove.”

The powerful scene speaks to how—for dads willing to shed pretense and express lament—there can be healing. There can be healing in solitude as a dad cries out to God in honest pain, leaning on him for strength and hope. But there can also be healing in finding a community of other dads whose suffering might lie hidden until they express it in lament.

Strong fathers are willing to lament in a world that might see it as weakness. They’re real about the fact that fatherhood is often joyful but occasionally sorrowful: it’s strength and vulnerability, laughter and weeping, the delight and the pain of watching your kids grow up.

Decades after that August day when I first entered the vulnerable but glorious vocation of fatherhood, I can vouch for the reality that lament will come for every dad, as surely as joy. And lamenting what’s lamentable has made me a better father.