When "For Good" Finds You

About the Songs That Hold Our Grief

Nov 17, 2025

white and brown ceramic figurine — Photo by Karina Vorozheeva on Unsplash

Some songs seem to lodge themselves somewhere between your larynx and your heart. And for quite some time, “For Good” from Wicked has been one of mine…

I more or less stopped performing in musical theatre when I left Germany in 2006 (I’m sorta old 🤣) and relocated to Scotland. “Wicked” never made it to a German stage until 2007. And yet, I used to perform its songs many times since it first saw the light of day in 2003. Back when I was a musical theatre performer and I also sang in concerts/gigs. Back when my voice didn’t catch on certain sharp edges of memory. Up until then, “For Good” had been a song about friendship, about gratitude, about the indelible marks people leave on each other to me. It was beautiful and safe.

And then my mother died…

The Before and After

She was fifty-nine when ovarian cancer took her in 2009. Fifty-nine. An age that seems impossibly young now I’m in midlife myself. At the time, I couldn’t see past the immediate crater her absence left in my 30-something life. A thousand small deaths followed: the first birthday without her call, the first Christmas without one of her parcels, the first time I needed a mother but didn’t have one anymore.

But there was also the sudden, excruciating inability to sing “For Good”…

I tried it as a solo once, a few months after she had died. I was alone, thankfully, because I only made it through “…and we are led to those that help us most to grow if we let them…” before my voice literally broke. The song that had once felt like a simple meditation on friendship had transformed into everything I’d lost, everything she’d been to me, everything that would never be again.

“Because I knew you, I have been changed for good...”

“For Good” is not really about grief. Stephen Schwartz wrote about the transformative power of important relationships, about how the people we encounter shape us in permanent ways. Glinda and Elphaba are saying goodbye, yes, but it’s not a funeral dirge. It’s a song to impact, to mattering, to the fact that we don’t walk through this world untouched.

And yet...

For those of us who have lost someone, “For Good” can become something else entirely. It becomes the song that speaks the unspeakable: that the person who is gone still lives in every choice we make, every kindness we extend, every moment we choose differently because they existed (for better, for worse). The song doesn’t traffic in platitudes about “being in a better place.” Instead, it offers something so simple it borders on raw: You changed me, and that change is permanent.

“Like a comet pulled from orbit as it passes a sun,” Glinda sings, and I think: My mother altered my trajectory forever. The fact that she’s gone doesn’t undo that.

And then you get lines about blame and forgiveness, and they just break something open in you if the relationship was deep but also complicated…

The Painful Symmetry of Grief

A few days ago, my ten-year-old daughter listened to “For Good” for the first time, completely by chance (I think you can’t really escape it right now). And then I saw her eyes filling with tears, and we weren’t even halfway through.

She didn’t say anything. Neither did I, but I knew.

Her grandfather is dying of cancer. We’ve been honest with her in age-appropriate ways. She knows it’s coming. But I don’t think she had allowed herself to really feel it up until then, or maybe the song just unlocked something in her that she didn’t have words for yet. The same thing it unlocked in me over fifteen years ago...

There is something painful but also profound about the moment my daughter encountered the same song that undid me, feeling the same wordless grief lodge itself inside of her. I don’t want this for her. What parent would? I want to protect her from every hurt, especially this one, because it is the first time she will truly feel that love and loss are irrevocably intertwined.

But I also recognise the strange gift in it. She and I are connected through this song in a way we weren’t before. When she’s older, when she’s weathered more losses, maybe “For Good” will still be there. As a through-line, a companion, a recognition that grief is both personal and universal.

My mother never met my daughter. She died before so much of my life as it is now unfolded. But through this song, through this moment, I feel all three of us connected anyway. My mother shaped who I am. Who I am shapes my daughter. The change is permanent, and the comet’s trajectory holds…

The Universal Language of Grief

“Wicked” is having a major moment right now, and a lot of people are talking about how “For Good” affects them.

In a way, we are all singing the same song, even when we can’t get the words out.

Because grief is the most universal human experience, and we all need art that can hold it for us—that’s something AI will never be able to replace. And “For Good” does that. It simply says: This mattered. They mattered. You are different because they existed (even if things were complicated). And that difference, painful as it is to carry, is a gift.

When the time comes (and it will come, because that’s the price of loving anyone, or our lives being touched by anyone), maybe my daughter will have this song. And maybe, like me, she’ll find that it holds enough space for everything she can’t say.

That we are all changed for good by the people we love.

And that the changing never stops, even after they’re gone…