Forever Young: The Remix That Taught Me to Dance Again

The video started playing before I meant to click on it, and by the third line I was somewhere else entirely. I was sitting on the couch scrolling through YouTube last night when the algorithm handed me a song I thought I already knew everything about.

But it was different. so different that I had to stop and pay attention. Flashing lights and fireworks. A dance beat. And then that chorus, “Forever Young”, the one I have carried since I was a young man myself, dropped into a song I did not expect to hear again in quite this way.

The expression, Forever young, after suicide loss is not a phrase that I was ever comfortable with. For seventeen years it sounded like an accusation, a reminder of everything stolen rather than anything worth holding on to.

Seventeen years of losing our son John, and just as many years of sitting across from other survivors in our support group, has taught me that grief keeps finding new doors to walk through.

I did not expect one of those doors to be a David Guetta remix being played in concert at Ibiza. But there I was, watching a song I have known since Alphaville recorded it in 1984 suddenly turn into something entirely different. I closed my eyes and I was picturing our forever seventeen-year-old son John dancing like he owned the room.

For a parent who has lost a child, forever young after suicide loss means carrying two truths at once. The injustice of a life cut short and the stolen dreams. And the strange tenderness of an age that can never change.

John was seventeen when he died. He will always be seventeen. Forever seventeen. Forever young. Some days that fact feels like a wound that never closes. But this version of the song touched me and it felt like something closer to a gift , one small mercy tucked inside an unfathomable loss.

If you are in crisis right now, please call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. They are available around the clock.

The original “Forever Young” was released by Alphaville in September 1984, the same year I finished college and got engaged to Teri. I was twenty-three, months from our wedding, with the whole future stretched out in front of us. Alphaville wrote the song set to the anxious background of the Cold War, a song about wanting to stop time and stay young forever because growing old felt like a trap nobody could see a way out of.

I did not share that fear of the future back then. I was looking forward, not back, and I had no idea of what would be coming down the road, John had not even been born yet.

For most of my life since we lost John, though, it became a song about looking backward, wistful and a little sad, the kind of thing you play when you miss who you used to be. A song about missing someone who was gone too soon.

There was another song by that same title that meant even more to me, long before any of this happened. Rod Stewart released his own Forever Young in 1988, a completely different song that has the same name, and it was the one I actually chose to play for our kids. I used to put it on during long car rides with John and his sister buckled in the back seat, windows down.

It is not a song about fear or looking backward. It is a song about love, about showing up for your children and staying steady while they grow into whoever they are going to become. Every time it came on, it felt like my own hopes for them laid out in a melody I did not have to write myself.

The video for that song has always stayed with me too. Rod Stewart sings the whole thing to a red-headed boy riding in the back of a pickup truck through open country. Our son John and his older sister both had red hair. I could never watch that video without feeling like it had been written for our family specifically, even though I know it was not.

Two different songs, both called “Forever Young,” both mattering to me for completely different reasons.

I did not know a third one was coming.

None of that hope prepared me for what came later. Our son John did not choose to leave us. He was a junior in high school when he died by suicide in 2009, an outstanding student, a football player, a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo, a kid who filled up every room he walked into. There was a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and in our case, within less than four months, his brain betrayed him faster than any of us could act. A mental health crisis took him before we understood what we were even fighting. I have written elsewhere about why suicide is not a choice, and I still believe that with everything I have.

Alphaville was writing about a fear that never actually arrived, a nuclear ending the world managed to avoid. I have never been able to listen to the original the same way since we lost John, because our fear did arrive. Not the one they were singing about. A quieter one, the one where the future you assumed your child would get simply stops.

For seventeen years, the word “forever” in that title meant something closed and final. It meant seventeen was all John got. No college dorm room. No wedding. No children of his own. None of the ordinary future we had every right to expect. I have written before about what it means to keep counting the years since losing him at seventeen, and the math never stops feeling unfair.

This turned out to be the third “Forever Young” in my life, and it is the one I never saw coming. In October 2024, David Guetta and Ava Max released their own EDM version of “Forever Young,” built around that same unmistakable chorus Alphaville wrote back in 1984, but wrapped in entirely new verses and a completely different energy.

It was an homage to the 40th anniversary of that catchy title and song. But it was so much more. Where the original moves like a memory, the new one moves like a dance floor. Same words about wanting to stay young forever. A completely different feeling underneath them.

Ava Max opens her part of the song with brand new lines Alphaville never wrote, before that familiar chorus even arrives.

“Heaven can wait, no use in watching the sky
Don’t say goodbye, just hold me tight
Heaven can wait, I wanna dance one more time”

She is not singing about the Cold War or growing old. She is asking someone not to leave, asking to be held instead of saying farewell, and suggesting that whatever waits on the other side of this life could hold off a little longer for one more dance together.

The moment I heard those words, I knew John was in the living room with me, I could feel it in my heart, even if I could not see him there physically.

What David Guetta and Ava Max did was more like a praise song at a church event. The young crowd is dancing joyously with their hands up to the sky. The lights, the energy, the joy on the dancers faces. They are deep into the explosive feeling that there are moments worth remembering. There are moments that they will carry forever. And very importantly, the people that care deeply for them will always remember them. I could see John up there dancing to the music.

What amazes me most is that the chorus itself never changed. Forty years later, the exact words that once sounded like mourning now sound like celebration, and nobody rewrote the chorus to make that happen. They just built something new underneath it.

That is not so different from what grief does to a memory over enough years. The facts of what happened to John do not change. What I build underneath them, the life I keep living, the meaning I keep finding, that is where the real movement happens.

I do not fully understand why the same handful of notes can land in my heart one way at twenty-three, engaged and looking forward, and an entirely different way four decades later, after everything that came between, but the research on music and grief backs up what I felt sitting there. Music reaches the brain’s reward system directly, the same pathway that lights up during genuine pleasure, which is part of why a song can shift an emotional state faster than almost anything else we have access to.

If you are reading this in the middle of a hard week, or a hard year, I want you to hear this part first. It is allowed to feel joy. It is allowed for a song to make you smile instead of cry, even years or decades into missing someone. That shift is not a betrayal of them.

Watching the new video, I could see John immediately. Not the version of him from those last four months, the one none of us could save. What it gave me was the version of John who brought flashing lights to every party he went to, who was always the first one up on the dance floor, who made mix CDs just so he would have the right song ready the moment he walked in. He was full of energy and loved sharing every bit of it with everyone in the room. Bigger than life in so many ways, long before any of us knew how short his life would be.

Here is the song I am talking about. This is the song that touched my heart.

I have written about music on this blog before, about songs John loaded onto my MP3 player that I found again on a work flight years later, and about a birthday memorial video that led me to Jenn Bostic’s song about tragically losing her father.

Other survivors have found the same kind of moment in Willie Nelson’s “Something You Get Through” and in a dozen other songs that found them at exactly the right time. This one felt different. This one was not sad at all, and that surprised me more than anything else about it.

Grief researchers describe this as a continuing bond, the idea that a relationship with someone who died does not end so much as it changes shape, a concept John Jordan’s clinical work on suicide loss has written about at length. I trained as a physicist before any of this happened to us, and the one idea that has stayed with me from those years is that energy never disappears. It only changes form. John’s energy did not disappear either. It just changed form, and lately it has been showing up in a dance remix of a song I have known my whole adult life.

I believe John is in heaven, safe now and free of whatever storm was moving through him in those last four months. That belief has been tested and rebuilt more than once since 2009. It still is not simple, but it is mine, and I hold onto it. This is a peace I believe John has now, not a message that pain has to become unbearable before it gets better.

If you are having a hard day, please stay, and please call or text 988 if you need to. There are people who are there to talk with you.

The day I found this remix of an old song, I could picture him there clearly, dancing free of everything that ever hurt him, flashing lights following him the way they always did, pulling everyone else onto the floor too.

John died on Good Friday. For a Catholic family, that date carries its own weight, the darkest day on the calendar, the one that only makes sense because Easter comes after it. I have written before about what that timing taught me about faith, and this song landed in that same territory without my expecting it to.

A song about wanting to stay young forever, rebuilt into something joyful seventeen years later, felt like its own small window into heaven. Not a simple one. Not one that erases the Friday it came from. But a real one, the kind that only shows up after you have sat in the dark long enough to earn it.

Many survivors in our support group describe something similar, a moment when an ordinary thing, a song, a smell, a shift in the light, arrives at exactly the moment they need it most. I have written before about what it means when a sign like that finds you.

I cannot fully explain the timing of finding this remix on a week when I needed it, only that it happened, and it helped.

Healing after suicide loss is a long marathon, not a sprint, and even after seventeen years in I am still finding that out. I used to think the hardest work was mostly finished in those first raw years, the ones full of firsts and funerals and learning how to function again. What nobody told me is that the marathon keeps offering new roads to explore even now. New miles. New songs. New memories. New ways to feel close to someone who has now been gone longer than I sometimes want to believe.

I did not go looking for this particular piece of new road. It found me on an ordinary evening, sitting on the living room couch, thanks to an algorithm that had no idea what it was handing me. That is part of what still amazes me about this marathon seventeen years in.

The emotions are not used up. The well is not dry. What was old can become new again and still catch you off guard, still put a smile on your face and a small tear in your eye both at the same time. There can be joy and hope in healing.

This song let me celebrate the life John did have instead of only grieving the one he lost. The ski trips. The rattle snakes and the scorpions he found in the yard and wanted to keep. The Taekwondo tournaments. The way he could walk into any room and make it louder, brighter, more alive. Seventeen years is not enough time with anyone, but it was a real life, full and specific and entirely his own, and this song gave me a new way to hold onto that.

If you are days, weeks or even years into a loss and none of this feels close to true yet, I want you to know the marathon does not move in a straight line. Some years it is insight from a fortune cookie. This year, for me, it was a dance remix I never saw coming.

Forever young after suicide loss does not have to mean only loss. Sometimes it means finding your person again in the last place you expected, dancing free of everything that ever hurt them, and letting that be enough for one evening.

If you have your own song like this, one that used to mean grief and now means something closer to celebration, I would love to hear about it in the comments below. And if you are still looking for people who understand this particular kind of marathon, there are suicide loss support group meetings available across the country, and the door is always open.

I miss John every single day. I also believe, that he is somewhere he can finally dance without struggle. Both of those things are true at once, and I am learning, slowly, that they can live in the same heart without canceling each other out.

John will always be Forever Young.
And we will love you forever.

PS
If you are feeling nostalgic, here is the original 1984 Alphaville Video

Posts You May Also Like

• Do People Who Die by Suicide Go to Heaven? A Catholic Dad’s Answer – A closer look at the faith questions this post only touches on.
• Seventeen Years and Still Counting: Long-Term Survival After Suicide Loss – A fuller look at what long-term survival actually feels like, seventeen years in.
• Finding Signs and Messages: Experiences of Connection After Suicide Loss – For survivors wondering whether an ordinary moment like this one can really mean something.
• I Am Not Okay, But It’s All Gonna Be Alright – Another music-driven personal essay, this one built around a Jelly Roll song and Jack’s first support group meeting.
• Day 2,922 of our Journey: The Gift – A companion personal essay on finding unexpected gifts inside a very long grief.

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