Death robs you of something but everything else keeps going in “The Last Place I Saw You Alive.”

Track: “The Last Place I Saw You Alive”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

There are a million choices, but every time I listen to “The Last Place I Saw You Alive” I think about two songs with the same theme: Christian Lee Hutson’s “Northsiders” and Pinegrove’s “Old Friends.” Specifically, “Old Friends” has two lines that I permanently connect: “I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago // saw some old friends at her funeral.”

It’s not difficult to find Mountain Goats songs that connect with this one. A lot of fans tie it back to Transcendental Youth and specifically to “Steal Smoked Fish,” which similarly looks back on people you once knew and the place you knew them. What I love about this take on the theme is the insistence that this is both extreme (someone has died and you are looking at the last place you saw them) and mundane (the lyrics enforce this is “just the way the math works out”). Your experience may vary, but I find it easiest to process loss as both of those things at the same time. It’s very important, to you, but it’s also something that happens to everyone. That robs it of some of the power to destroy you.

I want to pull out one more lyric before we leave this one. “It’s changed since you were here, or else it hasn’t” will mean something different to everyone. One of the hardest parts of personal loss is the continuation of everything else. You have to get up and go to work. Other people go to that bank or that bar. The world moves, often unchanged, despite what feels to you like a seismic event. It often feels like you should see that all in the landscape, just to reflect back what you’re going through.