When Shawn Mendes Became a Lifeline

When my father fell ill in his final days, the lyrics of Shawn Mendes’ In My Blood became an unexpected refuge, helping me process the reality unfolding before me. The song’s plea — its raw, urgent cry against the weight of helplessness — resonated in a way that felt almost too personal. “Help me, it’s like the walls are caving in” — those words captured the suffocating dread that gripped me in the small hours, waiting for news, hoping for a miracle I already knew would not come.

The song does not offer easy comfort; nor does it deny the pain of endurance. Instead, it acknowledges the struggle — the desperate search for strength when every instinct urges collapse. “I just wanna give up, but I can’t.” That was it, exactly. The exhaustion, the emotional erosion, the moments when hope felt like a cruel joke. And yet, beneath it all, an unspoken defiance: the fight continues, not because it is easy, but because surrender is unthinkable.

The grief that followed those long hours of hope devoured far more than mere minutes on the clock. Time became something else entirely — stretched thin by the weight of waiting, then suddenly contracting in the wake of loss. It felt as though I had internalised that noble struggle — like one who inherits a legacy they never wished to bear. Because that is what remains, isn’t it? The fight itself. The love that made the battle worthwhile. And that quiet resolve — even in sorrow — to carry on.

For a long time, I could not bring myself to listen to that song again. It had become too entwined with the rawness of those final days, with the weight of a grief I was not yet ready to face fully. But last night, I listened once more. And for the first time, the feeling that surfaced was meaning. Perhaps the final piece of a grief hidden in my own blood.

One day, I hope to meet Shawn Mendes and thank him for the quiet strength his music lent me in such a harrowing moment. Some voices transcend music; they become a lifeline.

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