Ever since my father was a teenager he collected jazz and classical records. Yesterday I went through some of them—he has a few thousand—and selected about twenty to take home.

The bulk of them will stay in the shelves in his Brooklyn Height apartment. For now.

I also took home his phonograph, a light weight old gray plastic General Electric Automatic, which he’d recently moved into his bedroom so that he could listen to music.

Now it’s in my living room.

It was tough to select just twenty of my dad’s records. After much deliberation I took a nice mixture of German lieder, Italian opera, art songs, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. I grabbed an album from 1966 called My Favorite Hymns by Leontyne Price, which includes Amazing Grace, Lead Kindly Light, What a Friend I Have in Jesus.

The records smelled of age and mildew and were suffused with that distinctly vinyl odor. Dust gathered on my fingers—even cardboard pieces falling off the albums—as I browsed quickly. The gap between my knowledge of classical music and my father’s felt huge and unpleasant. I didn’t know which to take as I acknowledged that the person who could advise me died two months ago.

I found myself gravitating toward Schumann, Schubert, Bach—my familiar loves—even as I wanted to expand my taste and know which of these albums were most special to my dad.

I had lost my guide.

My father had many versions of Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti; I reasoned that he must have really loved this opera so I grabbed one boxed set with a beautiful cover (sung by Maria Callas and Giuseppe Di Stefano).

When I got home I set up the phonograph on the coffee table and put on the real treasure of my haul, a 1949 album from Columbia records in a simple pink and white record sleeve. My muscle memory directed me to put the LP on the record changer. It didn’t seem to work so I pressed the album down somewhat clumsily and moved the needle by hand toward the first record groove of the album.

The performer is Bidu Sayao, a Brazilian soprano with Milne Charnley on piano. It contains My Encores and Folk Songs of Brazil (Emani Braga).

That exquisite artist of the Metropolitan Opera Association, Bidu Sayao here sings with infallible taste and charm two groups of songs, the first comprising nine songs that are favorites of her audiences’ and of her when sung as encores and the second consisting of eight fascinating songs drawn from the vast folk literature of Miss Sayoa’s native Brazil.

My father played this album for me in August. We listened without speaking to the side called Folk Songs of Brazil, which he loved. Sometimes music just hits me in spontaneous perfection. This music sounded triumphant for that moment in time.

One song especially, Capim di Pranta is, according to the liner notes, a song sung by weed pickers from the Province of Alagoas. A woman overseer warms them not to be lazy. When her back is turned, the workers answer her with "an impudent chorus."

On this incredible album there are spirituals and children’s street songs, funny songs,  haunting and sad melodies. Listening to Sayao, I found myself beginning to feel some of the grief that has been difficult to access since my father’s death on September 7th.

The weeks after his death felt almost festive with the funeral, the shiva, and lots of time with family and friends. I I threw myself into writing the eulogy and an intense level of social interaction.  Afterwards there’s been much business to take care of. There still is.

Last week I observed that I was down. Really down. My energy level dipped enormously. Like many others around me, I had a host of flu symptoms—fatigue, sore throat, sneezing.

Those symptoms went away but then I began to feel a certain deadness, like I was living outside and away from the living. I felt old and depressed and deeply sad. Like I was watching a movie of my life without me.

Election Day afternoon, as I lay on the couch listening to the Bidu Sayao album the tears came. I cried for my father and for the way that music was the love of his life (as it is mine).

I cried for the way that music had consoled him during his illness. I cried for the way that he moved that very phonograph into his bedroom so that he could listen to his favorite records.

I cried for the fact that for my father, music was not an option but an essential part of his every day.

For me, music is a pathway to my emotions as it moves me more than any other art form. I know I have been avoiding this grief, flicking it away because I’ve been determined, I guess, to survive his death without the pain that is necessary to go through.

But lying on the couch in the living room, watching the phonograph twirl, listening to Bidu Sayao’s sumptuous soprano voice, I realized that there is no way to avoid the powerful emotions that I must allow myself to feel.