A song for someone who died too young must hold what was AND what should have been, without losing the specific person to the shape of the loss. The risk is that the song becomes about the unfairness; the discipline is that the song stays about the person. We write to that bar.
What this kind of song holds
These songs hold the years they had as their own complete thing, not as a prelude to absence. They hold what they were becoming. They hold the people they were becoming it FOR. The best ones leave room for everyone in the room to fill in their own particular grief.
What to put in the intake
Give us who they were AT THE AGE THEY WERE. Not who they "would have been." Give us their loves, their work, their habits at that moment of their life. Give us what made them themselves. The song lands hardest when it stays specific to the years that existed.