Extending Grace to Our Messy, Moral Selves: Reflections on “This Ride”
Welcome back to Music in Conversation, an opportunity to explore documentary songs as pathways into what it means to be a human in a messy world with other humans. This month’s featured song was written by Hazel Delehey in collaboration with her father, Neil—a partnership that itself speaks to how care and creativity extend ourselves across generations.
Beyond Perfection
“This Ride” tells the story of Neil’s cancer diagnosis that reignites a childhood dream. Upon learning he has cancer, Neil dreams of buying a motorcycle–a cool bike with spoked wheels and saddlebags. But in the hospital, he encounters a young girl, also a cancer patient, pulling an oxygen cart, and Neil’s perspective shifts: “In two seconds she helped me travel a thousand miles in my brain,” Neil says, describing how a fleeting interaction changes how he thinks about his own life when confronting death.
One of the things that strikes me about this song is how it refuses the sanitized version of facing mortality that our culture often demands. Instead, it offers something rarer and more honest: permission to be imperfectly human in the face of death.
The Courage to Want What We Want
There’s something wonderfully human about Neil’s dream of getting a motorcycle. In a culture that expects cancer narratives to be either heroically inspiring or deeply profound, Neil’s song reminds us how wonderfully honest our desires often are. The motorcycle doesn’t have to be a metaphor for freedom or a symbol of seizing the day—it’s a childhood dream, something that looks cool, with “spoked wheels, a real cool ride, saddle bags hanging on the side.”
This honest admission of desire when confronting mortality isn’t unique to Neil’s story. The recently released Hulu series “Dying for Sex” chronicles the real-life journey of Molly Kochan, who after receiving a Stage IV metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, left her marriage to explore her sexuality for the first time. Neil’s desire to buy a motorcycle and Molly’s sexual awakening represent the same fundamental refusal to let a terminal diagnosis erase who we are or what we want.
This thread of the song reminded me of Being Mortal, Atul Gawande’s exploration of mortality, in which he observes how “the battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.” Neil’s motorcycle dream, like Molly’s pursuit of sexual fulfillment, feels like an expression of this kind of integrity—a connection to a self that is still full of life and can dream, even if those dreams may seem frivolous or inappropriate to others–and that’s okay.
A Shift in Perspective
It’s while carrying this perfectly human desire that Neil has the encounter that changes everything. “In two seconds,” Neil writes, “[the young girl] helped me travel a thousand miles in my brain.” This isn’t a gradual awakening or a carefully constructed epiphany—it’s the jarring recognition when we are focused on our own suffering and we encounter someone else’s reality.
The child pulling her oxygen cart becomes what Susan Cain, in Bittersweet, might recognize as a moment of profound bittersweetness—the simultaneous experience of pain and beauty, sorrow and connection. Cain argues that these bittersweet encounters are essential to our humanity because “sadness is a prosocial emotion, meaning it engenders compassion and empathy for other people.” Neil’s embarrassment about complaining isn’t shame about having authentic desires, but rather the sudden expansion of perspective that comes from recognizing shared vulnerability, and the beauty of the full life he has already led.
The Art of Extending Inward Compassion
This expansion of perspective—seeing his pain within the larger context of shared human struggle—becomes the foundation for perhaps the most radical act in ‘This Ride’: Neil’s choice to extend compassion to himself and his own complicated humanity. Rather than resolve the tension between wanting what he wants and facing profound circumstances, the song holds both truths simultaneously. This is what Cain calls learning to live with “light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—forever paired.”
The encounter with the young cancer patient doesn’t eliminate his desire for a motorcycle or make it seem foolish. Instead, it places that desire within a larger context of shared human fragility. When facing his diagnosis, Neil is able to feel grateful for his life and compassionate toward his own fear and confusion. This is emotional maturity at its finest—the ability to hold contradictory feelings without needing to resolve them into neat categories of right and wrong.
Gawande writes about how “we have purposes larger than ourselves,” but he also acknowledges that recognizing these larger purposes doesn’t negate our smaller, more immediate desires. The cancer patient can simultaneously want to serve something greater and also want a really cool motorcycle. Both desires emerge from the same human heart trying to make sense of mortality.
Beyond a Hierarchy of Suffering
To me, the subtler, but no less important, message in “This Ride” is how it quietly dismantles the hierarchy of suffering that often prevents us from extending compassion to ourselves. Neil’s initial reaction—feeling embarrassed about his complaints when confronted with a child’s more visible struggle—reflects our culture’s tendency to rank pain and determine who deserves sympathy more.
But the song doesn’t end with Neil simply feeling guilty or silenced. Instead, it models a more nuanced response: recognizing that suffering isn’t a competition, and that extending compassion toward others doesn’t require withdrawing it from ourselves. This is the kind of wisdom that emerges from what Gawande calls standing “reverently before our mortality”—not as a source of shame, but as a recognition of our shared condition.
Living with the Questions
“This Ride” doesn’t offer easy answers about how to face mortality with dignity. Instead, it does something more valuable: it demonstrates how to live within the questions that death raises about what matters, what we owe others, and what we owe ourselves.
Cain argues that “bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art.” Neil and Hazel’s collaboration in creating this song represents exactly this kind of transformation—as do the powerful visual works in Lilly’s Oncology on Canvas® collection (featured here), which capture the complex realities of cancer with similar honesty. Both the song and these artworks take the messy reality of cancer diagnosis and the unexpected emotions it provokes, and shape them into something that can be shared and understood.
In a world that often demands we perform appropriate responses to tragedy, “This Ride” offers something more honest and ultimately more helpful: permission to be human in all our contradictory complexity. The child with the oxygen cart and Neil facing his cancer diagnosis share the same fundamental experience—trying to figure out how to live fully within the constraints of mortal bodies and uncertain futures.