I Am Beside You

We had a couple of days in London last week. One of the things we did was visit Isaac's name at the National Covid Memorial Wall on the walkway besides the Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament. It's 500 metres long, a public mural with over 200, 000 red hearts painted on the wall and thousands of them then personalised to remember a person who died with Covid as the direct cause of death on the death certificate. A friend wrote Isaac's name onto the wall in early December 2021, in the week after he died. We've visited it three or four times now. One of the things I wanted to do when we went last week was re- ink his name. A lot of them are fading now.  

It's a strange thing and always very moving. When we go to his grave at the cemetery it feels like we are going to see him, that that is where he (or part of him) resides. Our weekly routine includes a trip to the cemetery. Going to the Covid wall feels different. It's in a part of central London that is always busy with tourists. As we walked away from the wall, a small group of people were talking, in a very matter of fact kind of way.

'What's this?'

'It's a memorial for all the British people who died from Covid'.

'Ok.'

That is what it is but so much more. It's a place which is deeply personal but also very public, opposite one of the most famous buildings in the world and while our grief has been very personal to us, at the Covid wall he's part of something else, part of a national, global, catastrophe. Each and every heart of the wall is a person and behind every heart, name and message is a larger group of people, friends and family, permanently affected by this. That he is a part of this always affects me in a way that is different from going to see him at the cemetery.

Covid seems so long ago now- the initial fear as scenes from Italian TV showed genuine horror in their hospitals, the lockdowns, the working from home, Zoom, an hour's exercise a day, how unlocking would work, tiers, the total mess created by Johnson's government, the winter lockdown of early 2021, masks, the vaccine, the oft mentioned 'new normal', and the highly optimistic feeling from some that we might construct a slightly different approach to doing things as a society afterwards. 

I watched the Nick Cave film This Much I Know To Be True this week, a 2022 documentary directed by Andrew Dominik, capturing the working relationship between Nick and Warren Ellis in 2021 as they play various songs from Ghosteen and Carnage, a pair of albums directly informed by the death of Arthur Cave. There is a section where Nick talks through his ceramics (eighteen Staffordshire ceramic figures telling a story of the life of the devil), a part with Marianne Faithful, and Nick at his laptop talking about The Red Hand Files, the questions he receives from fans and how he responds to them. The live sections, Nick and Warren, a string section and three backing singers, are incredible, cathartic performances- filmed I realised as watching it, during Covid and the summer of 2021 when the world began to creep back to some kind of normality. In an interview section Nick talks about one of the emails sent to him at The Red Hand Files and how he sees himself. Nick says where once he would have described/ defined himself as a musician and writer, now after Arthur's death, he was trying to see himself not as those labels but as a husband, father, friend and citizen, who also sings and writes. 

In this clip from the film Nick sings the song Ghosteen Speaks, a song which opens with the words, 'I am beside you/ Look for me', a lyric where Nick feels Arthur's presence.

'I think they've gathered here for me', Ghosteen/ Arthur says in the song, via Nick, 'I am beside you/ You are beside me/ I think they're singing to be free/ I think my friends have gathered here for me/ To be beside me/ Look for me...'

It's an extraordinarily powerful song for me, one that I hear and feel a bit differently now than I did two years ago. Time doesn't heal but you can get used to living with the permanent scar of grief. 

Ghosteen Speaks