Family Folklore and the Crown of Screws
- aListen
- Mar 26
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 14
Some stories live in your body long before you understand them.
They get passed down in pieces—handed off like heirlooms wrapped in memory and love. This is one of those stories.
And, like most of the important ones in my life, it circles back to music in the end.
It came to me first from my dad—not long after it happened.
He was undergoing radiation at Cleveland Clinic, and he told me about the device they had to use.
I now know it was called a stereotactic head frame—a metal crown, screwed directly into the skull to keep the head perfectly still and guide the radiation.
It has to be placed with precision, which is why patients stay awake for the procedure. In his case, it was done without any anesthetic.
And because the first placement wasn’t correct, they had to remove it and do it again.
I remember the way his eyes welled up as he described it.
The pain was real. Raw. Vivid.
But his spirit? Still open.
His heart? Still giving.
Even while he was living it, he was willing to share it with me—not for drama, but for truth.
That in itself was a kind of strength.
After he passed, my grandparents—Mimi and Papa—kept his story alive in other ways. They’d pass down pieces of him through memories and photos.
That’s probably how this image came into my hands. I found it in an old album and asked about it.
Over time, the story wrapped itself around the photograph.
Folklore born from firsthand memory.
At some point during that experience, a nurse warned him:
“Most people bleed a lot when the frame comes off. Don’t be alarmed.”
So my dad asked for a moment alone.
No one knows exactly what he did—but I imagine he meditated, connected inward, grounded himself.
And when they took the frame off?
No bleeding.
Not a drop.
Midgley magic. Crown of screws, hat of ease.
You can see the effort in his hands—the tension it took to be still.
But the hat? The sunglasses?
Peak “keep it light for the people I love” energy.
It says: “Yeah, this sucks. But I’m still gonna show up with style.”
“Don’t worry. I got this. And I’m still me.”
Bleeding is typical with this procedure. The scalp is highly vascular—removing the frame usually causes a surprising amount.
So for there to be none… that’s not just a medical detail.
That’s family folklore now.
When I went through my own cancer curriculum years later, I created a shared album with my mom and husband called Remission Possible.
It was a digital scrapbook of sorts—updates, reflections, photos, and things that moved me.
Among the images I included were a few from my dad’s journey—like this one.
Walking that path brought me closer to him in surprising ways.
I had only known him as a little girl.
But in that space—moving through dis-ease, finding peace in trust, and holding steady in the unknown—I got to know him differently.
From the inside out.
Music, Memory, and Moving Forward
My dad didn’t just endure pain—he turned it into music.
He wrote songs that helped me through my own hardest days—songs like Sliding Backwards, In Between, and Life’s Too Fast.
Each one holds a mirror to what it means to be human in the face of struggle.
To fall apart and still find rhythm.
To be cracked open and still create.
Those songs helped carry me when I walked my own cancer curriculum.
And now, I carry them forward—not just as memories, but as part of my voice, my art, my healing.
Because that’s what music does—it holds what we can’t say, moves what we can’t fix, and connects us across time and experience.
Music keeps our people alive.
Even when they’re no longer physically here, the melodies they wrote—or the ones that remind us of them—let us feel their spirit again.
Music becomes a kind of conversation we get to keep having.
A presence we get to carry forward.
A bond that doesn’t break.
So maybe this story—the crown of screws, the quiet strength, the sunglasses in a hospital bed—isn’t just about the past.
Maybe it’s a chord still ringing.
And I get to play the next note.
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