Songs that make you cry

Do we all have songs that make us cry? You can hear it one hundred times, and every time it gets you choked up into tears.

The song "Life Ain't Always Beautiful" from Gary Allan gets me every.single.time.

I find the song so real. Maybe it is because I know the back story behind the song. Gary Allan's wife suffered from depression and committed suicide. During his grief, he made the album "Tough All Over" which has many songs that helped him with his grief, including this one.

It always makes me think about our own struggles. Not "our" as in my life, or my family, but all of our lives as humans, and all the trials each of us have to face. It's true, like the song lyrics say, "Life ain't always beautiful. Sometimes it's just plain hard." At times it is hard to sit back and question why bad things happen to good people. It's the question passed through the ages, I suppose.

Every time I hear the song, and how he says, "[life] it can just break your heart," I think back to our family's struggles the past few years. I think about my friend who lost her 2.5 year old son in January 2010. I think about that friend of mine from high school who passed in a car accident. I think about the trials I faced as an adolescent. I think about my off and on battle of depression. I think about all these things and ask, "Why why why?"

"Life can knock you down, it can break your heart."

The best conclusion I settle on, is our struggles are what make life real.

I heard one time on Coast to Coast AM, with a psychic medium (don't laugh at me, I love Coast to Coast!), that she communicated with a baby that passed at birth, right after her father held her. The Medium's response was this infant, now in the other life, said she experienced enough love to fill a lifetime in those moments her dad held her. How sweet is that? I don't understand why some people die so young, but the idea of people being ready to move on because they've experienced so much love that they feel complete, it's very comforting.

As for the rest of us, and our daily life encounters...
"But the struggles make me stronger,

And the changes make me wise,

And happiness has it's own way of takin' it's sweet time."

Aside: Don't you just love that when you look at lyrics of a song, how some seem to transform to a beautiful, lyrical poem? Of course, I am a bit of poetry nut, so examining songs out of the element of the music fascinates me.

As Allan says though, those struggles make us stronger, "tears will fall sometimes ... but it's a beautiful ride."