Beyond “Why Me?” - Music Therapy and Emotional Knowing in the Face of Finitude

While medical systems rely on categorical distinctions to organise care, from the perspective of lived mortality, these distinctions eventually cease to exist. Whether in an oncology ward or a palliative unit, patients are confronted with the same existential rupture, the sudden exposure to mortality that gives rise to the question, “Why me?”. The more I sit with this question, the more it multiplies. The water muddies; certainty recedes. Medical care can often provide explanations, diagnoses, probabilities, and treatment pathways, but these answers rarely address what is being asked. Sometimes they do the opposite: they confirm that the wound is not informational. Even if a complete explanation were possible, it would not, by itself, dissolve the existential and psychological pain that has already taken hold. And to be fair, this is not only a limit of Medicine or science. Even if philosophy, psychology or theology could offer a perfectly sufficient causal account, whether in the language of karma, divine will, fate, or moral order, the wound would not necessarily close. What remains is not a demand for more explanation, but for a way of bearing and knowing what cannot be solved. This moment suggests a different kind of orientation. The crisis is not simply a lack of explanation, nor can it be resolved by expanding causal accounts. What is at stake is not knowing why in the explanatory sense, but knowing how to remain—how to stay present to one’s life when its continuity has been threatened. This form of knowing is neither propositional nor explanatory. It does not resolve uncertainty, but reorganises what can be felt, endured, and shared. In clinical encounters with existential suffering, such “knowing" often emerges not through interpretation or reassurance, but through embodied and relational practices that make the unbearable bearable without pretending it is solved. These practices do not negate finitude, nor do they promise reconciliation. Instead, they alter the conditions under which suffering is lived, shifting attention, affect, and relational presence in ways that allow experience to be held rather than escaped.