Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 52



“The Heart You Break May Be Your Own”

Plane Crash Site Memorial

Camden, Tennessee

You have to drive through residential Camden and then walk down a gravel path into the woods to get to it: the site of the 1963 plane crash that killed Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, and Randy Hughes. Their names—along with musical notes—are engraved on a large gray stone that marks the spot.

A few steps back from it, among the trees and poison ivy, someone has fashioned a cross out of PVC piping. There is a spray of silk flowers poking out of the top, and a rosary, a worn peppermint-striped ribbon, and a red cowboy handkerchief hanging off it.

There are two Patsy Clines in my head. First, there’s the immortal one—the one that I thought of when all I knew of her was “Crazy” and “Walkin’ After Midnight.” This is the untouchably legendary Patsy with the chilling voice, who looks out from her final album covers with a sultry gaze and striking red lipstick. This is the Patsy I see in footage of her performances, looking serene in her perky button-down dresses and sculpted eyebrows, saying little but singing so big and so full of expression.

Then there is the human one I’ve learned about in various biographies. This is the Patsy who loved performing in the cowgirl outfits her mother made, who enjoyed yodeling during her performances, and said she felt like a prostitute when singing pop songs instead of country. This is the Patsy with the foul mouth and supposedly voracious sexual appetite. She also liked to cook and be a homemaker and loved her babies.

Perhaps it is artificial to separate the two, because it sometimes seems that the phenomenon she was meant to be was always somehow a part of her. She craved stardom from a young age, and sought it out like someone who almost knew, deep down, her time to achieve it was short. In her teen years, she had to drop out of school to support her family, working at a drugstore and waitressing. In those years, however, she was already singing at local nightclubs and variety shows, showing up at radio stations asking to sing, and writing letters to the Grand Ole Opry requesting an audition.

Her early auditions were not the cinematic, record-producer-drops-his-cigar-and-exclaims-“this-little-gal-can-SING” sort of affairs. She had to work at it. She had to develop a distinctive style. Her early recordings were not successful. Her ambition, however, was tireless and obsessive. Her mother, to whom she was very close, found her drive perplexing and exhausting.

Was it just that she wanted fame and money and applause? Or was there something else pushing her? Perhaps she had a deep, subconscious sense that she was destined to create something beautiful and timeless, and that she had limited time in which to fulfill that destiny. Indeed, friends of hers, such as Dottie West and June Carter Cash, claimed she had premonitions of her early death. In the months before her death, she gave away some of her belongings and made sure others knew her wishes regarding who would raise her children. She was only thirty years old.

I know her death at thirty is immensely tragic. She left behind two small children, not to mention her brokenhearted mother. Yet her short life is, nonetheless, inspiring. How many of us pursue our potential with that kind of intensity?

I know I don’t have a legendary Gretchen hiding somewhere inside of me. There was a moment, however, when I was deciding whether to stay in my old life or break out of it, when something that felt outside of me said, “There is something else you are supposed to be doing.”

Am I doing it now? I suppose a mere trip to Nashville isn’t going to be enough. That’d be a rather sad destiny if it was. I don’t think mine will result in anything as beautiful or lasting as Patsy’s. But I do have one that’s more than this, more than the life I was living. And it’s not up to me whether it’s a breathtaking, transcendent legacy or simply a legacy. That’s not for me to ask, or to ask for. I can only follow it, as she did, and have faith that it will mean something.

It is when I think of this that I’m reminded of one of Patsy’s lesser-known songs, “The Heart You Break May Be Your Own.” There is probably no “may be,” about it. I think in the end, it always “will be.” Because you can only go one way or another, can’t you?



—Tammyland