Three Years

Finally it is here- 30th November. It feels it's been hanging over me for ages. November is a double punch- 23rd November is Isaac's birthday and we wait for that to arrive with everything it brings and then there's a week where we wait again, for the anniversary of his death. He died on 30th November 2021, three years ago today. The two being tied together so closely is very difficult. We've all had a very tough week with some really difficult and gruelling days where our emotions have been very close to the surface and coping with every day things- work for instance- has been really hard. After today there will be some respite I think, some relief from it all, before we're flung into Christmas. It's incredible that it's now three whole years since he went. It feels like no time at all in some ways. Time really is relative. 

Isaac died in a side room off a Covid ward in Wythenshawe Hospital, at about quarter to two in the afternoon. The three of us were with him. I can remember it all so vividly. The previous day we'd spoken to a consultant. It was a Covid ward. He'd seen, he told us, a lot of people die. I asked him how it would happen, what would physically happen to Isaac when the end came and it was pretty much exactly as he described it. Some time afterwards, a few weeks maybe, lying in bed and unable do much except drink tea and scroll aimlessly on my phone, I saw an article in one of the broadsheet newspapers with a headline that said scientists had discovered whether when we die our lives really do flash before our eyes. I didn't click through and read it but it made me think about what Isaac would have seen in those last moments. Good things I hope. 

I've said before here that the time since his death has sometimes seen him swallowed up by it. By him I mean Isaac, who he was, the person he was and became, the things he and we did together. It is the grief, the loss, the full fucking horror of your son dying aged 23, gone in less than a week, suddenly, wrenched away from us. It is the massive ball of grief, the knot of anxiety I carry round inside me. It sits inside my chest and stomach, expanding and contracting, sometimes a thing that I've learned to live with and sometimes, like this week/ month, something that engulfs me. Trying to keep sight of him when you're overcome by it is not always easy. We talk about him and smile when we mention the things he did or said, laugh about the stuff we got up to. It hurts less some of the time. And sometimes it kicks me about, makes me cry in public places, makes me feel like I'm carrying a massive weight around with me. After today it will shrink a little for a while- I think it will anyway. Today is a milestone (or millstone) to get past, another date to see the back of, another end to a few weeks that just have to be endured. November is a fucker. 

In the time since Isaac died there are songs which have changed their meaning for me. Some of them are songs that I knew really well before he died and then when listened to at some point in the days since early 2022 have shifted, the words taking on a new layer of meaning. One of those is this one by Nick Drake (who coincidentally died fifty years ago last week aged just 26, the age Isaac would have been last Saturday). 

'Cello Song

'Cello Song opens side two of Five Leaves Left, Nick Drake's debut album, released in 1969. Fast but melancholy folky, finger picked guitar, a cello and some hand drums, all recorded up close and with real immediacy by Joe Boyd. Nick songs in that whispery, very English voice. I don't know what the word are about, what Nick meant by them. They are very poetic, very literate, not really contemporary to 1969's lyrical concerns at all. There was a point when I heard the song and had been to see Isaac at the cemetery- I don't remember exactly when, summer 2022 maybe- when it became a completely new song for me, it had a new meaning for me. Halfway through the second verse Nick sings...

'But while the earth sinks to its grave/ You sail to the sky/ On the crest of a wave'

The third and final verse continues...

'So forget this cruel world/ Where I belong/ I'll just sit and wait and sing my song/ And if one day you should see me in a crowd/ Lend a hand and lift me/ To your place in the cloud'.

I don't need to unpick that do I. 

At Isaac's funeral, at the graveside, we chose this poem to be read by the celebrant- The Dead by Billy Collins...

'The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes'

I think something in 'Cello Song reminded me of The Dead. Both bring me some comfort. 

I've been going through Nick Cave's back catalogue too. There's lots to find in there. Playing CDs in the car while driving to and from work recently this song really struck me anew...

The Ship Song

Written way back in 1990, when I was only 20 with no idea of what was to come, this song was on The Good Son and was perhaps the first mature Nick Cave song. Piano and organ, with Nick at the fore and the three Bad Seeds (Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld and Barry Adamson) providing angelic backing vocals, The Ship Song is full of metaphor and is clearly a song about romantic love, doomed love maybe, love as struggle; but, as it has swelled and filled the space inside my battered Peugeot car this week in the cold dark mornings and evenings of fucking November it has given me something, I don't know what, something to hold on to. 

'Come sail your ships around me/ And burn your bridges down/ You are a little mystery to me/ Every time you come around'.

Thanks for sticking with me if you've got this far and thanks to everyone who does respond to my grief and Isaac posts. I know they're a bit heavy sometimes- I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to read this first thing on a Saturday morning. The comments and best wishes from the people who are part of this online community really do mean a lot. 

Onwards and upwards eh? Always onwards. Aiming upwards. 

 

Two Years

Isaac died two years ago today. In normal terms two years would seem like a long time but under these circumstances it doesn't feel like very long at all. Part of me still thinks he might come in through the front door at some point, dropped off by his college bus after a week away. I can recall the last few days at home and then in Wythenshawe hospital so clearly and vividly that it could have happened yesterday and it doesn't take much for me to be back in the room in the hospital with him, those days and hours that led up to him leaving us, at 1.45pm on Tuesday 30th November 2023. Or standing in the car park on the phone to my parents. Or the walk I took behind the trolley with the two porters through the hospital corridors to leave him at the mortuary. Or arriving back at home in the dark without him, the three of us suddenly in a new world we didn't ask for. I don't think about these things that often but I have done this week in those moments where I haven't been distracted by something else, driving to and from work especially. I'll be glad when today is over I think, another anniversary navigated and survived. The anniversary of his death and his birthday exactly a week earlier are paired in away which is really difficult. Last week we took him some goodies for his birthday. Today we'll go to the cemetery and take him some flowers and try to remember him as he was. 

Nick Cave writes about grief a lot. At his Red Hand Files he encourages people to write in to him and he'll reply, unfiltered. A lot of people write to him about their own grief or his and he replies eloquently and with experience and wisdom. A lot of it rings true with me. On Carnage, the album he made with Warren Ellis in 2021, an album I bought while in a record shop in Manchester in the hazy, unimaginable weeks after Isaac died, there's a song called Lavender Fields. Carnage has many great, explosive, funny, horrific and image laden songs, songs about white elephants, Black Lives Matter, Botticelli Venuses with penises and the hand of God. Lavender Fields is none of these things.

Lavender Fields

On Lavender Fields Nick sings of being 'appallingly alone on a singular road', walking through the lavender fields and how the flowers stain his skin. He describes the world as furious and how he is over it (the world). The line, 'Sometimes I hear my name, oh where did you go?', I assume is about his son Arthur, who died in 2015 (and the whole song is I think, although Nick said at Red Hand Files that the song is about change, about 'moving from one state to another'). Warren Ellis' music is simple and stately, rising and falling organ/ synth/ strings, church music. It becomes elegiac and choral, the backing vocals swelling as the synths ascend and then fades out slowly. 

'Sometimes I see a pale bird wheeling/ In the sky/ But that is just a feeling/ A feeling when you die'. 

Nick then shifts up again, emotionally and spiritually, the song transporting him (and us- well me anyway)...

'We don't ask who/ And we don't ask why/ There is a kingdom in the sky'

At Red Hand Files recently he was asked about writing about grief through music. This is a part of his reply...

When I started to write Ghosteen, my intention wasn’t to write a record about the death of my son, but as I scribbled away, Arthur inserted himself into the process. He became the ruling force, perched there at the end of every song to exert his sovereignty. He showed me how to write the record and I simply had no choice in the matter.

Nowadays, when I sit down and begin to write, I feel the dead, all the dead, ferrying the words forward. They are not necessarily the subject of the songs, rather they are the spiritual energy that runs through them. The dead are always with us, holding us in their sway. We, the living, are the exuberant and temporary anima of their departure. As songwriters we scratch away, writing ourselves into existence in order to enliven the spirits of those who have passed on.

I can't articulate or explain exactly what Nick means here but I get it. It reminds me of the poem we had read at the graveside, The Dead by Billy Collins. 

'The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes'

A few weeks ago I met Mat Ducasse aka Matty Skylab. Mat makes music, once as part of Skylab and more recently under his own name. I've posted some of his music here before- Love Theme and Bunny's Lullaby are both impossibly beautiful, cosmic ambient pieces, profound and emotive. In September he put out a two track release called Juniper Songs and I'm not going to attempt to describe the two songs on it, I'm just going to point you towards them. You can find them here. We had a chat for a few minutes and we asked each other how we were. 'We abide, we endure', Mat said to me, and those words are as true as anything anyone has said to me recently. Thank you Mat. 

Go On

I was reminded of this poem earlier this week while reading something else, sweltering in the heat we've had hanging over us. It's called The Dead and it's by US poet Billy Collins.

'The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes'

It was the final reading at Isaac's funeral last December, read by the celebrant at the graveside. I found it in a poetry anthology I have and it seemed appropriate. How we managed to do anything last December baffles me looking back, never mind plan a funeral- it seems now like we were alternating between being on numb autopilot and stumbling round in a fog. I haven't thought much about the poem since the funeral but reading it two days ago, sitting and sweltering in the heat we've had hanging over us for the last few days, it moved me (again) and I was struck (again) by the sentiment in it and it seemed to provide some comfort in a way I hadn't considered when I chose it back in December. 

I've not been very well recently. In the middle of May I developed a cough which refused to go away for six weeks. After three weeks of coughing I went to the doctors and they sent me for various tests- a chest X- Ray, blood tests and so. All came back clear. It was suggested I might have developed asthma and I was prescribed an inhaler which made no difference. Just as the cough started to clear up I went deaf in my right ear (nearly four weeks ago now). At a rough estimate I'd say I've got about 10% of my hearing in that ear. It's muffled and feels blocked and no matter what I do I can't pop it. It seems my sinuses and eustachian tube are blocked but nothing seems to be unblocking it and as well as being incredibly frustrating (not being able to hear is grim) it veers between uncomfortable and painful. In the morning it has sometimes cleared but as soon as I get up and stand up, it fills up again. At times the tinnitus in the right ear is very pronounced too (although that was there before it got blocked). Since going back to the doctor I've been on a steroid nasal spray and decongestants but nothing seems to be working. I've had some hay fever in the past but nothing like this. I don't know if the pollen is particularly bad this year- some reports say it is- and maybe my hay fever has been exacerbated by having Covid last December, everything inflamed by the virus, or if the stress of the last seven months has poleaxed my immune system, or if it's something else, but having never been a particularly ill person, it's really affecting me being unwell for so long. I can't help but feel it's in some way connected to Isaac's death and the aftermath of all that. Apart from anything else, it's really affecting my ability to listen to and enjoy music, which is shit. 

This is new from Panda Bear and Sonic Boom, a summer infused slice of Beach Boys style psychedelic pop called Go On with a Troggs sample contained within it's grooves. An album follows in July. It's got little to do with either the Billy Collins poem above or my medical woes but it's a feel good piece of music for the middle of July and even heard in mono lifts me up.