Chapter 13 - Flanders

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We bought a video camera after Max's leukaemia because of the possibility that he might die, and have about sixteen hours of video of the family. About a year after he died, Sara went away with Paula for a weekend, and I decided to watch the videos. It was very painful and yet again in a strange way I was glad I managed to do it. It was another mountain that had to be scaled. I could not bear to see them after that.

Memories are strange. There are sights, sound and smells which can invoke a whole vista of experiences that you never realised that existed. I find this particularly so with music. It often captures a moment in time. 'E-Bow the Letter' by R.E.M. is such a song.

I first remember noticing this song when taking Max to hospital. We were about halfway there when the song was announced. I asked him if he minded if I turned the radio up. He said nothing. He was very withdrawn. He was dying and he knew it.

I turned up the radio and was fascinated by the strange words and it became my 'song of the moment'. Later I bought the album and that song and the song which follows, 'Leave', for a long time became irretrievably linked with so much pain.

I have a memory of me in our kitchen late at night just after Max died and after Sara and Paula were long gone to bed. This music was on very loud and I was drinking to dull the pain. Max was dead. This was the start of my grief.

The songs played and I drank and cried, moaned and howled for my lost child. I talked to Max in those days immediately after his death. Not because I really thought he was there, but because it helped soothe the pain. This went on for hours until I was very drunk and cried out.

Every time I heard E-Bow, it was not the images which came pouring back, it was the emotions, the feelings on that and other nights. Pure distillation. Pure pain.

Again, slowly, very slowly, these songs and many others ceased to be the bookmarks of Max's death. They still invoke the thoughts, but the emotions became subdued, distant and receding.

A curious by-product of my grief was a strange amnesia. I found that as time progressed whole episodes from Max's illness became almost irrevocably erased from memory. Sara mentioned one of the Unit children to me after Max had died. I had no idea who she was talking about, my mind was a complete blank. I lay awake much of the night trying to picture this child and her family. The memory eventually returned. This was a child I had seen nearly every day, and I had spent a lot of time talking to her and her mother. This amnesia also happened after Max's leukaemia. I totally forgot the nurses, doctors, even the location of the kitchen. We lived there for three months and yet it all became erased. I think this is part of the healing process in which the mind tries to consign what it can to the dustbin.

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