“Time can bring you down
Time can bend your knee
Time can break your heart
Have you begging please
Begging please
...
Beyond the door
There's peace I'm sure.
And I know there'll be no more...
Tears in heaven.”
- From Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton
At a funeral I was performing recently the family chose this song as a final “hymn.” Having been a radio DJ I was perhaps more comfortable with this than some of my peers might have been. Perhaps along with Layla and Wonderful Tonight, this is Eric Clapton’s finest artistic moment at perhaps the saddest moment of his life. Tears In Heaven was written about the tragic death of his four year old son Conor.
Clapton is a bluesman and though this ballad is not strictly in that genre he uses many of the bluesman’s emotion to make this a classic song of catharsis. In the end there is also a sign of hope and, in what my colleague at the funeral called a secular hymn, Christian hope too; peace beyond this pain and a place somewhere where there is no tears at all; a snippet of a glance at Revelation 22.
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