What is the meaning of the song Silent House by The Dixie Chicks?

Answer 1

This song is about a person struggling to cope with alzheimer's and other memory-loss related illnesses. I get the feeling that this woman is not dead, just moved to a nursing home.

It is terrible because now the voice or persona of the song is trying to come to terms with the loss of a woman who cannot remember the little things, those small details, that made her her. "Everything that you made by hand, everything that you know by heart" is gone. Even the fact that "in the closet hangs your favourite dress" is an indicator that this beloved woman has lost so much of her memory: if it was her favourite dress wouldn't she have taken it to the nursing home that she was going to?

Now the persona is left to "try to connect the pieces you left."

With this song I feel a real sense of sadness because I can relate to the persona. You revisit their house and you keep expecting to see the person pop out from around the corner and offer you a cuppa. But instead you see "the books that you read laying in piles of paper shreds" and it's almost as if the person died because they're just gone.

Sometimes it's worse than if the person had died because they can't even remember who you are anymore, and everything that you shared together is gone.