I was a far cry from the girl in the yellow chiffon skirt singing “Me and Bobby McGee”: I’d long lived in anxiety, with this constant tightening in my chest. I also realized that fear sometimes prevented me from personal progress. I’d never thought about fear as the opposite of freedom before. In his mind, the lyrics meant that we couldn’t let fear of the unknown stand in the way of progress scientific or otherwise. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” was kind of a mantra for him. My grandfather was an engineer and worked on nuclear power plants in the 1950s and 1960s, exciting and new technology at the time. It was the only thing that evoked a reaction in him.Īfter he passed away, I learned that the song had a larger significance for him personally. I sang “Me and Bobby McGee” to him and he started to cry. We all started recounting memories with my grandfather: Trips we’d gone on as a family, visits to their house in Massachusetts, poems he liked and anything else we could think of. He was half-conscious, but the nurse told us that we should talk to him anyway, that he could still hear us even though it didn’t seem like it. While he was dying, my family visited him at the nursing home. My grandfather passed away when I was 22-years-old, the year after I graduated from college. Naturally, he loved that he played a part in unearthing my love for Janis. The next time I visited my grandfather, I recounted my victory to him and showed him a recording of my performance.
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