Keep Me in Your Heart

What do you write when you know it’s the last song?

Warren Zevon found out in 2002 that he had mesothelioma and maybe three months to live. He made it a year. He used that year to record The Wind. The last track is this one.

He didn’t write a protest. He didn’t write a summing-up. He didn’t write anything big. He wrote a quiet little acoustic song that sounds like someone singing to you from the next room over, gently, so he doesn’t wake anybody.

“Shadows are fallin’ and I’m runnin’ out of breath.”

He’s telling you exactly what’s happening. He isn’t dressing it up.

The song is a list of instructions, and the instructions are tiny. When you see a red sail—that’s me. When the engine’s running hot—that’s me too. Hold on to that. Hold on to the small stuff. That’s where I’ll be.

There’s no god in the song. No afterlife. No promise that he’ll see you on the other side. Just a plea to stay present inside someone else’s memory. Keep me in your heart for a while. Not forever. A while. He’s even bargaining about the timeline.

He went on Letterman that fall, knowing it was the last time he’d ever be on that show, and Letterman asked him what he’d learned from facing this. Zevon thought for a second and said, enjoy every sandwich.

Then he sang “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” like he was twenty-two.

Five months later he was dead.

I can’t listen to this one without stopping whatever I’m doing. It doesn’t let you multitask. It asks you to sit down and be quiet for three and a half minutes and consider that everyone you love is, eventually, going to have to ask this of someone else. Or you are. One of you goes first.

Engine driver’s headed north to Pendleton. Keep me in your heart for a while.

That’s the whole song.

That’s the whole thing.