There’s a song I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

It’s called “The Scythe,” by the British band The Last Dinner Party. It was released in 2025, written by a 25-year-old named Abigail Morris who lost her father when she was 17. She wrote the chorus as a teenager and found it years later, thinking it was a breakup song. It wasn’t until her sister pointed it out that she realized she had been writing about her dad all along.

“The nature of grief,” Morris told Apple Music alongside bandmate Georgia Davies, “is it takes years and years to realize what’s going on and how deeply it’s affected you” (Morris & Davies, 2025).

That line stopped me. Because as a funeral director, sitting with families, walking alongside people in the hardest moments of their lives, I see this repeatedly. Grief doesn’t announce itself clearly. It hides in ordinary things. In a record still spinning. In the water left running in the other room.

The Song

“The Scythe” opens quietly, almost domestically:

It’ll take you too, take a long time

Limbs’ll disconnect, like the phone lines

Keep the water on, keep it running

I’m in the other room, nothing happened

(Morris et al., 2025)

That last line, “nothing happened,” is one of the most honest depictions of grief I’ve encountered in music. It’s the dissociation. The way the world keeps moving and you keep performing normalcy, keeping the water running, staying in the other room, because acknowledging it fully would be unbearable.

The chorus offers something different: not denial, but continuity.

Don’t cry, we’re bound together

Each life runs its course

I’ll see you in the next one

Next time I know you’ll call

(Morris et al., 2025)

Continuing Bonds: A Different Way to Grieve

For most of the 20th century, grief was understood as a process of letting go. The goal was detachment. Moving through stages until you reached acceptance, and then, presumably, moving on. The deceased was supposed to recede.

But beginning in the 1990s, researchers like Klass, Silverman, and Nickman began documenting something different. They found that bereaved people, especially those who were doing well, weren’t letting go at all. They were maintaining active, ongoing relationships with the people they had lost. Talking to them. Sensing their presence. Keeping them woven into daily life.

This became known as Continuing Bonds Theory, and it reframed grief not as a problem to be solved, but as a relationship to be transformed (Klass et al., 1996).

The bond doesn’t end. It changes form.

What Morris Got Right

What makes “The Scythe” so resonant and so useful as a grief artifact is that it embodies continuing bonds without ever naming the theory. It doesn’t offer the afterlife as certainty of any kind. It offers it as the only frame that makes the loss survivable.

“I’ll see you in the next one” sounds like something you’d say to a friend you’re parting from at a train station. Casual, warm, already anticipating the next meeting. That register, treating death as a prolonged departure rather than a permanent ending, is exactly what continuing bonds looks like in practice.

And then there’s the bridge, which is where the song gets strange and brave:

Next time you call, I’ll be your girl

You’ll be in silk and I’ll wear my furs

We can go out, I feel your mouth

Open me up, butcher my heart

Please let me die on the street where you live

(Morris et al., 2025)

The fantasy of reunion here is specific and joyful via silk, furs, and going out. This is before it collapses into something raw. “Please let me die on the street where you live.” Dying near someone as the ultimate intimacy. The wish not just to be close, but to be in their world, even at the cost of everything.

This is continuing bonds at its most unguarded. The relationship hasn’t ended. It has simply relocated.

Music as a Container for Grief

Morris has said that she reaches her father through song lyrics, through psychics, through a robin she spotted on a walk. In her press statement for the single’s release, she wrote: “Once you know how it feels to lose someone, you enter a new realm from which you can never return” (Morris, 2025).

This is why music matters so much in grief. It’s one of the few places where the continuing bond can be honored publicly, without apology. When a bereaved person puts on a record that belonged to their person or discovers a song that seems to speak directly to their loss, something important happens. The relationship gets to exist in the present tense again, even briefly.

In my work, I’ve sat with families who describe music as the place where they still feel closest to who they’ve lost. A particular album. A song that was playing at the right moment. These aren’t superstitions or denial. They are, as the research increasingly shows, healthy and adaptive expressions of an ongoing bond (Klass et al., 1996).

“The Scythe Comes for Everyone”

Morris ends her press statement for the single with a line that I think belongs in every conversation about death and dying: “The scythe comes for everyone, and you shouldn’t be afraid about what’s on the other side” (Morris, 2025).

Not a promise. Not a doctrine. Just an orientation. One that holds death as part of life, and love as something that outlasts both.

That’s what good grief looks like. Not the absence of pain, but the presence of connection, even across the divide.

If you’re carrying a loss right now, I’d invite you to listen to “The Scythe.” And then ask yourself: where is your continuing bond? Where does your person still show up? in a song, in a habit, in the way you laugh at something they would have loved?

Think about the entrance song for a wedding procession, or the exit song at a funeral recession. What’s the song that sums up you or your loved one.

They’re not as far as the silence suggests.

References

Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Taylor & Francis.

Morris, A. (2025). Official press statement for “The Scythe” single release [Press release]. Island Records. https://www.nme.com/news/music/the-last-dinner-party-tackle-grief-on-new-single-the-scythe

Morris, A., & Davies, G. (2025). From The Pyre [Album notes]. Apple Music. https://music.apple.com/artist/the-last-dinner-party/1680519203

Morris, A., Nishevci, A., Miles, C., Roberts, E., Davies, G., & Mayland, L. (2025). The Scythe [Recorded by The Last Dinner Party]. On From The Pyre. Island Records.