My daughter Elizabeth and I had a special bond because of music. I never realized how important that was to her until I read an essay she wrote in the fifth grade that described how she and I “bonded” over music. Those were her words.

Liz was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was nine months old, and I lost her for a couple of years while her mother and I went through a vicious divorce and custody battle. Then, one day, while she was in the hospital and I was able to visit her, I pulled out my guitar. The nurses were all excited to have live music on the floor (hospitals are not known for their entertainment systems). Liz’s roommates and their parents were thrilled as well. But Liz didn’t want me to play. She said that music made her sad. Shortly thereafter I learned that the only CDs her mother would play for her were church music and “angelic” hymns. After the divorce my ex had turned to God for guidance, immersed herself and her family in some megachurch in the high desert where 7/11 songs were pummeled into the eardrums of the pious. (Seven words repeated eleven times. Oh, joy, oh rapture.) This was the music Liz found depressing.

It took a short while, some persistence, and refusal on my part to desist, but Elizabeth and I rekindled our mutual musical education. I mean, this was a kid whose first favorite song was Green Day’s “Basket Case,” which she danced to when she was fourteen months old. The toddler could shake it, man. As the year went by Liz and I would often trade songs – it was a little difficult as she entered her HilaryDuffBritneySpearsLindsayLohan phase, but I could find something to like in Kelly Clarkson. And I turned her on to Adam Ant – she loved Friend or Foe, she thought he was “bouncy.” It was always a treat for me to find something that Liz might like, but it wasn’t easy. She was twelve, and twelve-year-olds know what they like, done and done.

Then I heard a song called “Coin-Operated Boy” by the Dresden Dolls. A post modern cabaret punk tune from an unknown Boston band. Beautiful and precise with exactly the kind of lyrics that a preteen about to hit the hormone highway could love. And she did. She devoured the entire album. We talked about the lyrics. She had very specific ideas about what the song “Half-Jack” was about and I made her promise not to sing the curse words in front of her mother. At my house, I didn’t care, it’s part of the song, and I didn’t want her to censor herself. She knew the difference between right and wrong. Somehow it was weirdly fun to watch her enjoy the freedom to sing Bowling for Soup’s “The Bitch Song” and laugh with mischievous glee.

We talked about the singer for the Dolls, Amanda, whom I adored because she was the anti-HilaryBritneyLindsay. She wasn’t airbrushed. She was different. She shaved her eyebrows and painted, in their stead, musical hieroglyphics. She looked like she sweated. Liz loved her, too. Not just because she was out of the mainstream, but because she wrote her own songs and sang them and they were great. Liz wanted to learn to play the drums and start a band. She already had a name: The Sparkettes, a takeoff on her father’s band, Throttle Back Sparky. Liz wrote to the Dresden Dolls asking them when their autographed poster would be made available again, since the website said that they had run out. She wanted to put it next to her Hilary Duff poster, which was catty-corner to Bowling for Soup and opposite Adam Ant. The band sent her an autographed poster made out specially to her. She looked at it every day she was at my house.

Liz succumbed to her disease four days after her thirteenth birthday this year. She listened to music in the hospital to tune out the world when things got a little too chaotic, and it took me nearly two months to be able to listen to music again. Little by little it became easier. I needed music to be a tribute to my daughter’s life, not a reminder of her death. And that would come, I knew.

Then, yesterday, as I rode my motorcycle home to my current wife who is five months pregnant with Liz’s half sister, “Coin-Operated Boy” started playing through the earphones in my helmet. My iPod had been set to a playlist of music from the last two years. I thought I could listen to the song. I gritted my teeth and barreled down Highland Avenue at speeds not recommended for city driving. But halfway through I realized that I just couldn’t do it. Not yet. Too soon. I nearly crashed reaching for the iPod’s forward button, but I managed to move to the next song just as I was running the yellow light at Wilshire Boulevard. It was My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome to the Black Parade.” Yeah. Good. She’d never heard them.

She would have liked them, though.