My name is Frances Twomey, and the last 2.5 years of my life have been one long and difficult season of grief. I think we all have had moments where we say something to ourselves that we could never say out loud. The things we silently scream – the words whispered into the dark.

When faced with comfort or encouragement from well-meaning people, I have said what is expected of me to say, not what I have experienced or what I really feel. Over and over again during this season, I have said to myself: Am I allowed to think this? People will think I’m losing it. Can I say that? Out loud? To another human? Am I a heretic?

This tension is the heart of this project – Haunted. It’s the thoughts, songs, and conversations from the middle of my worst days. Those things I dared not say aloud, I have written down. I have said them out loud. Haunted is the result of the season that I have spent in the crosshairs of grief, caught between the expectations of others and the reality of suffering. It is about the poorly chosen words of others, the placating Christian sentiments that reveal just how uncomfortable we are with brokenness; it shows us that something is missing from the way that we deal with grief, as both humans and especially as people of Christ. 

During this process, the more conversations I had about hard times and trials, the more I came to understand the role that grief plays in our existence and the role grief plays in our faith. When I started playing these songs, people were identifying with a line or phrase – this is everything I have felt but haven’t been able to put into words. The hard and scary, the questionable and heretical, the profane and the unfiltered, the hopeful and expectant.

I think that if we truly want to see a change in the way that grief, trauma, and suffering is handled, we have to be willing to talk about it and sing songs about it and tell stories about it. 

This is Haunted.