2. Elephant - Jason Isbell

Helping people use insurance to protect themselves — and their families — from the financial impacts of serious illness is a big part of what we do.

But when doing so, it can be hard for us to reconcile the human impact with the financial necessity.

So, often, we focus on the quantifiable — the ‘hard’ facts.

Here’s what I’ve calculated you need,

this pays your debt,

this pays your loan,

this pays school fees,

this pays for this and

this pays for that.

Here’s what it costs,

here’re the tax considerations,

here are some other quantifiable options.

What we miss by doing this is the real-life impact of a serious illness like cancer.

A good part of this is an understandable reluctance to ‘play the emotion card’.

After all, a ‘professional’ adviser remains rational in all things, distant and stoic and shies away from using emotion in our conversations.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, you can probably tell how I feel about this now, but I’ve absolutely been guilty of this.

I’ve studiously avoided anything that might seem manipulative, and I worried that emotion could be used to manipulate.

Which makes it much easier to talk numbers than feelings.

Especially if, like me, you haven’t yet been through the emotional wringer that is having a loved one with a critical illness.

Then I heard Elephant, by Jason Isbell.

For the uninitiated, Jason Isbell is one of the best songwriters going around.

From Alabama, he came through a stint with another of my favourite groups, the Drive-By Truckers, and struck out on his own.

After a few good albums, his last few records are a clear step above what he’s done — or what anyone’s doing really.

His skill is in building a sense of place, then putting characters that feel real smack in the middle.

Frequently, he then turns around and kicks you in the heart with a great line and a sad story.

Well, that’s what Elephant does for me anyway.

It’s a song about a friend supporting another friend through cancer — the ‘elephant in the room’.

But it is, of course, so much more than that.

It describes some of the mundane reality of cancer:

I’d carry her to bed / sweep up the hair from her floor

It captures the depths of friendship — and the pain that comes with this in the face of inevitability:

I’ve buried her a thousand times / given up my place in line
But I don’t give a damn about that now

It puts you in the bar with them as they try to drink til the elephant disappears:

She said Andy, you’re better than your past
Winked at me and drained her glass
Cross-legged on a barstool, like nobody sits anymore

It humanises the cancer fight, takes it out of the soap opera context us inexperienced have:

Sharecropper eyes, and the hair almost all gone
When she was drunk, she made cancer jokes
Made up her own doctors’ notes

It’s the lonely story of a life fading away, one day at a time:

But I’d sing her classic country songs, and she’d get high and sing along
She don’t have a voice to sing with now

And it shines a light on the messy reality of death:

There’s one thing that’s real clear to me: No one dies with dignity
We just try to ignore the elephant somehow

It’s a wonderful, tearjerker of a song.

It talks more in its three and a bit minutes about the emotional toll of critical illness than I’ve ever been comfortable doing in the last 10 years.

In fact, even writing this I still feel that trying to link it back to financial matters cheapens the song, lessens it.

But it’s about cancer, and people get cancer, and those people will feel a financial impact from that awful disease.

And I can’t help with the emotional impact of cancer or a heart attack or a stroke or Parkinson’s disease or motor neurone disease or a brain tumour or any other critical illness.

But you can — and you can fight that battle with a clearer head if you’re not having to worry about the financial burden you or your loved one might suddenly be saddled with.

So for whatever reason — emotional, financial, quantifiable, responsibility or because of some song you read about on some silly sods blog — speak to somebody about how to protect yourself.

Have the awkward and uncomfortable discussion about insurance.

Let the insurance take care of the financial, so you and the ones you love can try, together, to ignore the elephant in the room.

Somehow.

PS: I originally wrote this back in October 2018, and I’m not happy with it. I feel that linking a song of such meaning to the commercialism of insurance sold it short.

This feeling was strengthened when one of my dear friends was diagnosed with cancer three months later.