WEYERS CAVE, Va. (AP) - Weyers Cave resident Bart Balint received his stage four lymphoma diagnosis in May of 2019. For the next several months, he and his wife, Melanie Balint Gray, retreated into isolation, briefly reemerging last fall after he completed his first six chemotherapy treatments. Not long after, COVID-19 concerns escalated, and the pair resumed more stringent regulations for themselves.
Everyone has felt the pandemic blues, but the toll of isolation has taken a different shade of blue for the Weyers Cave couple. Not two to let a bad roll of the dice get them down, they have turned to loved ones, each other and their musical craft to stay afloat.
Before cancer and a pandemic threw Bart Balint a curveball, he often performed at open mic nights with guitar in hand and his wife singing vocals by his side. When a mutual creative friend, Katie Curtin, sent out a mass email looking for someone to pair her latest poetry with song, Balint and Gray were eager to feed their flickering flame of creativity and dove into melodies and harmonies.
“We’re all creating. Most of us don’t want to believe we are. We put up all sorts of blocks and make negative comments about ourselves all the time, but even if that creativity is how to harmonize with a certain part of the song, that’s creativity in itself,” Balint said.
Thus, “Pandemic Blues” transformed from a humorous poem into a raspy, jazzy song with over 1,800 views on YouTube since being posted on Aug. 3.
Curtin’s poem ranges from a variety of issues people have moped about during the pandemic, from major hardships to minor inconveniences.
“No more cafe lattes at my favorite place. It’s a miserable time for the human race. I got those pandemic blues and they just won’t go away. These four fricking walls are getting me down, but there’s no other option. I just can’t leave town,” Balint sings in a raspy voice as the music video shows images of somber people in isolation and travel departure boards reading canceled flight plans.
Curtin coaches creativity and provides breakthrough coaching through her independent business, Katie Curtin Creative Life Design. While theater, mask making and designing are mastered skills under Curtin’s belt, she said the world of poetry is mostly new to her, having written “Pandemic Blues” as part of a monthlong creative challenge.
“I’ve always seen the arts as a really important way to process, to go through, to transform what life gives to us so we can make out of the worst of situations by making,” she said. “My intention was to explore what’s going on and make sense of it, to process it.”
Gray said she was hesitant at first to add her light, harmonizing vocals to the song for fear of negative backlash for poking fun at the global pandemic. After churning the lyrics in her mind for a while, she decided wry humor provides a necessary comedic relief from life’s tragedies.
“There’s a toughness and harshness to this time, and there are times when we’re all just going to throw our hands up and belly laugh or break down and sob,” Gray said.
Apart from sharing music, Gray and Balint have also looked to social media and video chatting services to maintain close connections with loved ones. Gray said a silver lining of 2020 is watching the love between friends and family grow more intimate in some ways as past troubles melt away in isolation.
“While we’re very isolated from people, we’ve actually become less isolated from them in a very real way because we’re both opening up more and more of our hearts to just anyone and everyone,” she said. “The physical distance doesn’t matter so much because we’ve both been dismantling these walls around ourselves.”
Dr. Purnima Joan Shahani is the couple’s dentist, Kundalini yoga teacher and friend. Through Balint’s diagnosis and isolation prior to the pandemic to now, Shahani said the couple have embodied an empowerment of resilience, refusing to allow dire circumstances to diminish their outward connections.
“This was even harder on the two of them because whatever little contact he could have was over. … It impressed me again because what they did with this extreme isolation is they found a way through music and through song to connect with everyone,” she said.
Because Balint has been confronting a life-threatening disease for over a year, he said the best approach to overcoming challenges and facing hardship is through grace, with a mindset of learning rather than fighting.
“This is not a battle. I’m not out to win some battle with cancer,” he said. “This is not a fight because you can never win a fight - you’ll always keep coming back. This is a dance, and it’s something I need to work with.”
By finding rhythm to groove through pandemic blues, Shahani said it’s evident that the human spirit can overcome any obstacle by shouldering it with help from others.
“Like this cancer diagnosis, something so big and so scary where the outcome is unknown, and we put it to music in a way that builds community and we can laugh and find joy in it,” Shahani said. “There’s something that speaks to the human spirit that death can’t even touch it.”
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This story was first published on Aug. 20, 2020. It was updated on Aug. 24, 2020 to correct the name of Bart Balint’s wife. She is Melanie Balint Gray, not Melanie Balint.
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