Photo by Clarke Tolton/Justin Hollar

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear," C.S. Lewis wrote in his 1961 book A Grief Observed, a collection of observations about the death of his wife. Joan Didion tackled the same topic—the loss of a spouse—in 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking. "Grief has no distance," Didion wrote. "Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life."

For as universal as grief is, we don’t hear the word "elegy"—that musical lament to the dead, which casts a longer shadow over music history than even romantic love songs—very often. Yet the examples have always been there, existing and thriving still. The most popular ones seems to suggest you don’t pour grief on thick: The lightest of touches in elegies—like Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s tribute to the late Paul Walker with last year’s "See You Again"—tend to play the best to mass audiences.

But elsewhere, in more fragmented corners of music, there's a small handful of albums that show the desire for intense elegies, the sort of engrossing ruminations on mortality that listeners often contemplate alone, together. Arcade Fire’s 2004 debut Funeral reached a new level of openness about loss, from a band as extended family still grappling with looming questions about how to live. Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, inspired by the death of Stevens’ estranged mother, was another work in this vein, albeit emotionally resonant in a different way than Funeral's anthems. And in its own way, this year’s version may well be School of Seven Bells’ SVIIB, released last week.

-=-=-=-The record is Alejandra Deheza’s nine elegies to bandmate Benjamin Curtis, who on December 29, 2013 died of lymphoma at age 35. At different points in the band’s career, Deheza and Curtis were collaborators, friends, confidants, lovers and—to hear Alley tell it—soulmates across lifetimes. In 2007, a handful of singles gave way to School of Seven Bells’ stellar 2008 debut Alpinisms. Through 2010’s Disconnect From Desire, their creative bond endured through separations both creative (Alley’s twin sister Claudia’s departure from the band) and romantic (Ben and Alley broke up before the album’s recording). In 2012, before Curtis’ diagnosis, the band arrived at its peak prolific output in recording and touring, bookending the year with the full-length Ghostory and the EP Put Your Sad Down.

SVIIB is the band’s final album, written before Curtis’ diagnosis and recorded amidst his battle. He was the band’s in-house producer and guitarist, recording instrumentals this time from his bed in various cancer wards. The album is at turns heartbreaking and life-affirming, lush- and austere-sounding, with dancefloor fillers, poppy R&B slow jams, and torch-song ballads. Like SVIIB, what you read below is the story of Alley and Ben, dictated by Deheza in her own words. This is her elegy.

The first time I met Ben was when we were on tour with Interpol in 2004. We were both in New York bands, but we had to go on tour to meet each other. It wasn’t until those tour stops in L.A. and San Diego that we interacted. We would see each other backstage, tell each other, "Hey, good show!" as we walked past each other. I was in On! Air! Library! [with my sister Claudia] and Ben with Secret Machines [with his brother Brandon].

But the first time that I actually looked into his eyes while we were talking, I felt like someone hit me with a thousand lightning bolts! We fell in love hard and fast on tour. It's definitely proof of past lives. I knew him. I’ve known him for thousands of years. I felt it in every part of my body that I knew that I knew him. From that moment on, we were inseparable.