There’s a vinyl record in my attic with dust so thick it turns my fingers gray. Pressed somewhere in 1977, it spins a country song that most folks I meet have never heard, and yet, for me, it’s become a sort of cracked mirror I keep glancing into, hoping to see who I was—maybe even who I still am. The song is “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye,” first recorded by Mickey Newbury in 1969, but it’s Mickey Gilley’s soulful 1975 version that has haunted me over the years. Hardly a chart-topper in the Netherlands, rarely spun in Helmond’s bars, and still, it stitched itself deep into the seams of my memory.
The chorus falls soft as river mud:
*“She even woke me up to say goodbye,*
*She even woke me up to say goodbye,*
*She even woke me up to say goodbye…”*
Years back, when my hair had more brown than silver, love left me in just as much silence. I was already a country singer by then, playing in Groningen, Rotterdam, or—if I was lucky—just some smoky local bar where you could trace your initials in condensation on the glass. But I didn’t have many songs to match the ache of walking through morning light after realizing you’re more alone than you thought you could bear. When I first heard Gilley’s cracked voice paint that scene—*she even woke him up just to say goodbye*—I thought, “Here. Someone else has lived this.”
There’s a patience to that lyric, an understanding that sometimes goodbye isn’t shouted, or wild with door-slamming and accusations. Sometimes goodbye is gentle, even necessary—a sad compassion I never learned to grant myself. My mind circles that line: “She even woke me up…” A love so considerate, she didn’t sneak out in the night. She faced him, for both their sakes.
Growing up, I thought heartbreak had to be dramatic. I thought you needed fireworks for pain to count, but what Mickey’s song taught me is that loss can be quiet—sometimes it’s the hush that stings the most. The morning silence after years of shared coffee, a pillow dent where her head was. I carried those images into my own life, and too often I sought out noisy endings, dramatic showdowns that’d make a good story at the bar later on. But, damn it, some ends just need honesty, not spectacle.
*“Just like a heart that can’t keep from crying,*
*He just sits there waiting for the man to die—
Oh, how I wish she’d let me cry a little more…*”
There’s a darkness in that verse I never learned to share. After my second marriage ended, friends and family expected shouting across the flat, wild apologies, ultimatums. Instead, we just sat there until the coffee went cold. I wanted to fall apart. Instead, I found myself thinking about Mickey Newbury’s original, hushed version—each syllable shivering from his lips—reminding me that not everything broken can be fixed by attention, by drama. Sometimes you’re just left with the echo.
In Helmond, hell, you’re supposed to dust yourself off, order a Bavaria, and pretend nothing happened. I tried. But Gilley’s mournful piano—always a little off-kilter, a saloon barely hanging on—suggested otherwise. In that music, I recognized my own failure to grieve properly, my fear of saying “Goodbye” because it sounded too final. I kept calling my exes long after the last song was played, hoping for one more chorus, one more verse.
*“Morning’s come, Lord, my mind is aching,*
*Sunshine’s standing quietly at my door…”*
That morning imagery, the slow ache of a rising sun that can’t erase heartache—I lived those lyrics for years. Even after love left, I could feel its impression in the bed, hear its echo in the kitchen. Eventually, I realized it’s alright to let that ache wash over you—there’s dignity in loss, a grace in learning to say goodbye without burning down what’s left.
If you’ve never played that record, crackly or not, you might wonder what makes a “minor” country song so important. It isn’t about the charts, the radio play. Sometimes, it’s the quiet songs—the ones with space for all the words you aren’t sure you’ll ever say—that become the ones we need most. “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye” isn’t flashy, isn’t loud. Instead, it’s honest, plainspoken, and stubbornly tender. And sometimes, that’s exactly the kind of song that keeps your heart stitched together, just enough to make it through another silent morning.
So now, decades later, when that vinyl comes down and the needle scratches its way into that lonesome piano line, I sit and remember the women I’ve loved, the lives I’ve tangled with and left—or been left by. I remember that saying goodbye doesn’t make you less strong; sometimes, it’s the bravest damn thing you’ll ever do.
Play that song tonight, wherever you are. And if you find yourself longing in the early-spring dark, just know you’re not the only one tuning in for a melody that understands leaving never gets any easier with practice. Sometimes you just need someone to wake you up, gently, one last time.
Kroes den Bock