Coldplay's "The Scientist" and Break Up Grief

by editor Michele Catalano

The only Coldplay album I own is A Rush of Blood to the Head. I was never a huge fan of theirs, but my daughter went through a big Coldplay phase, and I must have bought the album during that time period. I’m a big fan of playing music everyone in the house will like, and this was especially true when Natalie was living with me.

Shortly after my marriage ended one winter day in 2021, I decided to pull the album out. I was looking for something. I was looking for a song thåt would finish me. I had been crying on and off, feeling depressed and lonely and like life was never going to be the same again. It wasn’t. It would never be the same. Fourteen years of love and companionship were slipping away from me, leaving me bereft. I didn’t know what to do with my feelings; I didn’t know how to articulate them or find my way around them. I didn’t want to feel. I wanted to be numb forever, to protect myself from what might happen if I let my emotions go.

Enter Coldplay. I distinctly remember the day I listened. It was February, one month after he left. I was still new to feeling alone, to feeling both rage and sorrow. I was stumbling in the dark, unable to find a light switch. I needed to highlight my emotions, to let them shine, to actually feel my feelings. It was the only way through. I don’t know why I picked Coldplay. I had the National, my constant companion through all the harrowing times that led up to the separation. I had Boygenius. I had so much sad music to listen to, yet something led me to this album I never really listened to before, and had just as an accessory. 

I sort of paid attention, drifiting emotionally while scrolling on my phone, as the first three songs played. Nice album. Good music.

And then came “The Scientist.” From the first piano notes, I was pulled in. Before Chris Martin even sang a word, the song had a tone. I was alert. I was paying attention. I pulled up the words and read along as I listened. And I let the lyrics and the music move me. Oh take me back to the start.

I could feel my already brittle heart disintegrating like a dried out leaf a child stepped on. I could feel the crinkle, hear the crackling. 

Nobody said it was easy

No one ever said it would be this hard

The damn burst.  Well, not burst, but leaked. The tears started slowly, just a few drops finding their way down my face. It wasn’t sobbing or weeping, just a sadness that enveloped me and manifested as tears. No one ever said it would be this hard. 

How true that was. Of all the platitudes I received, of all the pithy toxic positivity people wanted me to embrace, it was those words that punctured the safety net I had set up for myself. I felt like I was falling, flailing. Why didn’t anyone tell me it would be this hard? Surely they knew. The heartache, the loneliness, the fear, the hurt and anger and questions, why didn’t they tell me I was going to grieve as if someone had died? 

Tell me you love me, come back and haunt me

He was a ghost. What I knew of him died that day he left. What I loved and cherished about him was gone, replaced with a sense of abandonment, with pain, with depression. “The Scientist” was guiding me in that direction, telling me to be at peace with my emotions, my sadness. It was allowing me the freedom to feel bad. It was allowing me to cry. 

I spent the first month after he left in a state of shock.I tried to carry on because people told me I was strong. People told me I could handle this. People told me to move on quickly. So I didn’t cry. I didn’t grieve. I tried to be stoic and rational about it. Then this song came to me, a gift from Chris Martin, a gift that said it was okay to cry. It was okay to break down. It was okay that it was all so much harder than I thought it would be.

Do not speak as loud as my heart

I thought about how loud my heart was at that moment. I had silenced it, I had suffocated it, and now it was speaking its pain, it was having its moment. 

I played the song three times, getting up off the couch each time, lifting the needle, putting it down precisely. Waiting for the piano. Waiting for the words. Waiting to be told to cry. I thought about the song as a whole and decided I didn’t want to know what it was really about, I just knew what it was about for me. It’s about crashing and recovering. It’s about yearning for what was, about wanting to get that back again but knowing you never will. “The Scientist” is a funeral dirge. It’s over,  I whispered to myself, putting a finality on the situation. I started to mourn then, I started to grieve. 

Oh let’s go back to the start

If only. If only everything was circular and led back to where we started. If only I could revisit it all again. If only I had more than photos and artifacts. If only I still had you. I cried that day, tears that had been on standby, that had been waiting for release. 

It’s such a shame for us to part

Such a cruel thing to happen, Especially when you don’t know why it happened, or even how. One minute he was here, sitting on our couch, in our living room, in our house, and the next he was gone, out the door for good, a disappearing act that would rival most magicians. I was left with a house that suddenly seemed cavernous. Filling that house with this music a month later seemed like the only way to combat all that. Feel my feelings. Experience my emotions. Listen to “The Scientist” enough times to have it make a room inside my heart, enough times to learn all the words, to take them in and spit them out as my own, to match what Martin was singing with what I was feeling.

I owe so much to this song, this whole album. So much is said about Coldplay—especially this week—and not a lot of it is good. But I will forever treasure “The Scientist” as a piece of art. The way the words wind themselves around me, forming a rope that squeezes my heart, extracting every last emotion from it.

Nobody said it was easy

No one ever said it would be this hard

I’m going back to the start

Not to the start of our relationship, not even to a spot where it was good, because when it was good it was great. I’m going back to my start. Refreshed, renewed, purged of my sadness and loneliness. I want to be where I was before I became a co-dependent mess. Before I gave my heart fully to someone who would not be careful with it.

“The Scientist” can be read a lot of ways. I prefer to read it my way, to embrace it as my “let go” song, to see it as a way to relieve myself of the tears that want to get out so badly.  Every time I feel like crying, every time I think of him and how much of a shame it was for us to part, I put the album on. I let the first three songs play out, waiting for that climax, those first notes, the pained voice. 

This is my song. I’m going back to the start.

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