"Life So Far", an open letter by Stacey Kelleher
Photo credit: Lindsey Patkos
Let me start by saying that I’m not writing any of this for sympathy - I’m sharing my life story (so far) to let others that have experienced similar things know that you can make it through hard times, even when it feels like you’re sinking in the deep end and can’t get back to the surface.
I’ve never lived a ‘normal’ life, whatever that means. Everything in my life has always been accompanied with some form of adversity that I had to figure out how to overcome.
I grew up an only child with a disabled dad - he couldn’t work from the time I was a baby because he was diagnosed with four different types of mental illness. From then on, my mom was the breadwinner and I had a stay-at-home dad. We couldn’t travel much, but my parents sacrificed a lot to put me through private elementary school growing up and started me in piano lessons at the age of six. I fell in love immediately. I would hear songs on the radio and immediately figure them out on the piano, which I later discovered I could do because I had perfect pitch and could identify any pitch without a reference. I begged to start guitar when I was nine, and they agreed. I’d write my own songs and sing them at home while my dad napped because his medications made him so tired. Everything was, well, fine.
Flash forward to 2009 and my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. I vividly remember calling her at work and begging through tears “Mommy, please don’t die…please don’t die!” She told me “I won’t, honey,” and I could hear her tearing up, too. So now I had two parents struggling with health issues and nothing but music to keep me afloat.
My mom had chemotherapy eight times and my dad took care of her after every single one. I’d go with my parents every day after school to radiation treatments for a month straight, listening to whatever music would distract me in the car on my iPod nano. Luckily, she entered remission, but that wouldn’t be the end of her journey.
I’d still been taking music lessons this whole time, and going into middle and high school, I began taking it even more seriously. I joined the middle school band when I switched to public school in the eighth grade (after begging my parents because I was getting excessively bullied and picked on by the other kids). I played in the percussion section and loved it. I also joined chorus and loved the way everyone’s voices sounded together. I would go home and record myself singing all the different parts of our songs in GarageBand on my iPod touch (upgraded from the nano one of those Christmases, thanks to mom and dad always making each Christmas even better than the last one, somehow). In high school, I joined marching band, jazz band, and the pit orchestra in musical theater. I was obsessed. Music was the only outlet I had.
Junior year, I toured Berklee College of Music with my uncle who lived near Boston. Walking around the campus with our tour guide, I instantly knew that I had to go there. Whatever it took, I would make it work.
Senior year, I applied and went back to Boston for my audition. I was surprisingly not nervous and showed up and did the best I could. Flash forward one month and I found out that I got accepted on a talent-based scholarship. I was elated. I found a way to keep doing music that would give me a fresh start from the life my family and I had struggled through.
Later on in my senior year, my mom was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma, which felt like the world was ending. I thought we’d finally made it out of the woods with her health scares, but apparently not. One day in the dead of New Hampshire winter, my parents were going to one of her treatments and I got a call at school saying they’d been in a car accident. I remember going to the nurse’s office and bursting into tears. I just wanted to go home. Thankfully they were okay, but our car was totaled (we only had one car, and as you can imagine, having two parents with disabilities/illnesses doesn’t make for an ideal financial situation). They were able to get a new one, but everything still felt uncertain.
Summer after senior year, I packed up and headed off to Berklee. My mom had finished her treatments and entered remission. I moved into the dorms and was ready to take on my first semester of classes. My mom, aunt, and uncle moved me in (my dad couldn’t come due to his mental illness) and we said our goodbyes. I started learning more about music each day than I had in a month of all the music extracurriculars and lessons I was taking in high school combined. I knew this was where I belonged. Everyone there was so kind, and I made tons of new friends.
Flash forward to the summer after my sophomore year at Berklee - I was staying in Boston and working a summer program that the college was having for high schoolers. My mom was going to be coming to a hospital in Boston to stay for three weeks to have a stem cell transplant. This would hopefully keep any cancers from coming back. I felt so grateful that I happened to be in the city that summer, because I was just a short train ride away from being able to go visit my mom. Her birthday fell in the time that she was staying at the hospital, and I spent lots of time with her that day and throughout her time there while she was sick in bed.
After the stem cell transplant, my mom’s health returned to normal and she’s been cancer and lymphoma-free ever since. I graduated from Berklee with a degree in Songwriting in 2019 and moved to Nashville that September. I’ve been here ever since, writing and releasing music, touring and playing local shows, and now, shooting my first music video.
I feel so proud of myself and grateful to my parents, family, friends, teachers, and other supporters for making it through the bumpy ride that was my life up until this point, and try to remind myself of that whenever I get lost in TikTok numbers, Spotify streams, monthly listeners, likes on Instagram, or whatever else is currently on my mind. For me, it’s not about having the most of anything - it’s about making art that means something and hopefully helps others that have gone through tough times in their life. And that’s a huge part of what I write my music about.
The music video for my latest single “Question It” shows the visual side of being thankful to your supporter in your life. I wrote the song with Davin Kingston and Jenny Baker after losing a job that I had playing music in Nashville without any reason or notice. I had no clue how I was going to get by, and if it weren’t for my boyfriend, I have no clue how my mental health would have fared. He stood by me through it all and reminded me that no matter how much change there is in my life, he’ll always support me the same.