My immersion in Sarah McLachlan’s music began with her 1993 album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. I don’t remember anymore exactly when I bought the CD; only that it was sometime the late 1990s and probably around 1998. I was still young then and living on the West Coast, fumbling towards wherever I was supposed to be— whenever that was supposed to happen.

When I went to the record store, I only knew Sarah McLachlan’s name, likely because I’d heard the hit “Adia” and gotten obsessed with it, clueless that the song came from her 1997 album, Surfacing. The first thing I did was ask the record store clerk where I could find all the Sarah McLachlan albums. He immediately told me about Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and that this was the record you bought if you really wanted to get to know Sarah McLachlan. I took his advice and a week later, after looping the album on endless repeat, I’d memorized all thirteen songs. Her soprano voice—clear, powerful and true—had become my new favorite high.

Not long afterwards, I learned that Fumbling was her third record and the one that brought her fame outside her native Canada, where she had been part of the music scene since 1988. But it wouldn’t be until days before her July 2024 Austin concert that I’d discover that my twenty-five-year-old musical obsession marked me as a “fumbler”: a hardcore fan of an album that stayed in the American top 50 for just one week in 1994 (Surfacing would remain in the top 50 for 86 weeks). Nevertheless, it would go on to become her best-loved work. I had been the Gen X rough draft of a Swiftie and never known it.

And really, what was there not to love, especially for a literati like me? Moody and lyrical, the album had a title that came straight from the lines of WWI poet Wilfred Owen’s  “Dulce et Decorum Est”: Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,/But someone still was yelling out and stumbling/And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. The singer had taken the theme of war and woven it into songs about losses on the battlefield of love. No romantic, I was still mesmerized by the album’s super-charged depth of feeling. Fumbling sounded like melancholy and I was hooked. Melancholy was what fueled me then, because I was a 30-something on the cusp of things I couldn’t yet see.

The serendipity that led me to her so many years ago led me to her again last March. Somewhere online and exactly when I wasn’t looking for her, I saw that Sarah McLachlan was coming to town. The very woman who pulled me inside emotion like the moon drawing tides to shore. No longer the young melancholic, I was navigating adult uncertainties that had come about through a forced reckoning with the unexpected. When I bought the ticket to see her show I was still reeling from the news I needed a painfully invasive biopsy and one week away from getting a life-complicating diagnosis.

In the consultations that followed, doctors only told me what to expect over the short-term because they needed tests and labs to make recommendations. I guessed I’d be post-operative by the concert because doctors don’t wait around to get people with diagnoses like mine on the table. What I didn’t know was where I’d be with the preventive treatment they would give me afterward. Or how I would respond or even if I’d have the energy to see Sarah McLachlan, the woman whose songs I’d been singing and loving for most of my adult life.

A hairdresser I used to see told me last fall that her musician husband, a man with a diagnosis similar to mine, was in surgery days before a concert he had to see. A magnificent concert, as it would turn out, because I had been there to see it, too. The hairdresser bought her husband a cane because he could barely walk without falling. She’d also called friends who were going and asked them to watch over him. The man was still medicated and in pain the night of the concert; but leaning on his cane and his friends, he’d seen the show he absolutely could not miss.

Imagining the man fumbling for balance in my mind’s eye kept me from selling my ticket and staying home. Sarah’s concert wasn’t just about 90s nostalgia: now, it was about pushing back against fear and what I couldn’t control and taking chances. Thinking of the people that had helped this hairdresser’s husband, I went online to a forum for the people who live in my neighborhood. There were a few thousand people in it; maybe someone else was going, someone I could go with, someone who might be there if I was unable to help myself.

That night on the forum I got lucky. Within an hour of my post, someone who didn’t have a photo to identify her, said she’d come along. She’d wanted to go, she’d thought about it. But she hadn’t bought the ticket. I did not know this person, but I accepted this chance act of generosity and trusted. She sent me a picture of the ticket she bought and said to keep in touch. She would be there, she would help. I didn’t think to ask why; I was just glad to have found someone who would help me see Sarah. I finally saw her face—pretty and kind, framed by a sweep of wavy silver hair—the night of the concert.

I lucked out again at the end of June, my doctors told me they wanted to start treatment the Monday after July 4th, which was also the Monday after the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy concert. Not only would have a concert companion who had sung Sarah McLachlan songs a cappella in college and dedicated “Hold On” —a song about love and illness from Fumbling—to a hospitalized friend. I would also have enough energy to see the concert itself, unimpeded by treatment side effects. I wouldn’t even need my hairdresser’s cane, which she had offered to me if I needed it. The night of the concert I left my back row seat and drifted as close as I dared to the stage where for almost an hour, I stood in stunned, wet-eyed gratitude.

On the drive home, chatting with my companion, I thought about how both of us had come to Fumbling as younger people: she in her 20s, I in my early 30s. Sarah McLachlan had been just 25 when the album first came out; and at the concert, she had called it the album of her youth, the one that had come before everything else: marriage in 1997, her mother’s death and first daughter’s birth four years later; the birth of her second child in 2007 and divorce in 2008; then her father’s death in 2010. In a 2023 CBC interview, she would also say this: [t]here’s a lot of emotional energy attached to this record for a lot of people. Fumbling had been about transitions from innocence to experience and about opening up to beginnings and endings on the journey forward.

There was more. In the days before the concert, I learned that both of Sarah’s parents had died of the same disease that had found me; and that the singer had cared for her father from his diagnosis to his death; and that she’d performed at benefits  to raise awareness and money for the disease. My companion did not know this either. But when she had accepted to come to see Sarah with me, she had done not only because she wanted to see the concert but also because she understood my predicament. Her father had gone through the same treatment I was about to undergo. He was well now, despite the fatigue and malaise, and she was happy he was well. One day you’ll get there, too. And when I did, I would marvel, more than I do now, at the people and things that had led me to the other side.