Time After Time

Summer's always the best time at the cemetery where Isaac is buried. The sunflowers are in the shops, the sky is blue, the grass is dry enough to sit on, and the light grey of his headstone catches the sun. 

Sunflower

Sunflower is the opening song on Low's 2001 album Things We Lost In The Fire. Until summer 2022 I never associated it with Isaac and since then I always do. 

'I bought some sweet sweet sunflowers/ And gave them to the night'.

It's well over three years now since he died. Last November, containing both his birthday and a week later the anniversary of his death, was very rough- the build up to his birthday and then the week in between. The next day it's December and then there's the run up to Christmas to be endured. When we got into January this year it felt a bit like everything settled down and that some kind of 'three years on' accommodation with grief had been made. The rawness of the anniversaries and the first two to three years faded a little and although I still thought about him every day it became possible to do so with a smile. The feeling that tears or the sucker punch of grief were always close to the surface receded a little. 

I noticed in the early summer that it still had the power to come in and floor me occasionally- sometimes a sudden gasp, that instant (but recurring) realisation of 'Isaac's dead'. It can sometimes leave me feeling like the breath has been sucked out of me. But more common was the gloom descending for no reason for a day or two, a sadness covering everything that wasn't directly triggered by anything, it was... just there. Then it would go. It happened in early May and lasted nearly a week. It's happened since but only for a day or two and then it dissipates. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut noted in Slaughterhouse Five.

Earlier this summer we came to a decision about Isaac's bedroom. It was largely untouched since he left it, when we took him to hospital on 27th November 2021. His calendar's were still on the wall, still displaying November 2021. His clothes and belongings still where he left them. I didn't like to go in there much at all. It had also though become a bit of a dumping ground for some of our stuff, some coats on his bed and so on. I went in there a few months ago and driving home from work a day or two after came to the conclusion we needed to do something about it. I wasn't ready to do anything about it until that exact point. Lou wasn't either. 

We decided to take his bed out, to go through his clothes and things and sort them out, keep the ones we really couldn't let go of but store them properly in some boxes, replace the bed with some furniture, and make it a room that was still his but not his bedroom. Going through his clothes was the most painful thing we've done since last November and made me remember how difficult this can still be- and also how far we've come. Some of the clothes, when we looked at them, we decided could go- some of them, straight away, we knew didn't spark anything but some of his clothes did so very much, they seem to contain his essence in some ways, to be a version of him. 

The room is now much better- brighter, some pictures of him framed and mounted, still his room but not the room he left that night, not a room preserved in time-  can go into it and feel ok. Progress. I'm not sure why this song is accompanying this post, it just seems to fit. The last song on R.E.M.'s second album, Reckoning, released in 1984. Something about the ringing guitars and Michael Stipe's vocals just suggested itself. 

Time After Time (AnnElise)