From the single digit days well into the teens, there was a constant stream of people visiting the house.
During the day, it was anonymous, uniformed couriers arriving with signed-for or simply handed-over flowers. Our regular postie came twice a day, bearing envelopes of condolence. One day, as she delivered another bundle, she stopped and said, ‘I’m sorry’.
After work hours, it was friends, familiar or long lost, that would appear on the door step, shuffling awkwardly, bearing their flowers. Occasionally I’d be the one to open the door. They’d stand there, ashen-face, staring at me. Sometimes they’d remain in a state of fearful shock, or sometimes they’d burst into floods of tears.
And, in the first few days, in that first, news worthy weekend, it would be journalists who’d come knocking. ‘They understood, no really, they did really understand. They just wondered if we’d possibly like to talk. To make a statement’.
On Day 1, The Sun arrived home before I did.
The house began to well up with flowers. After the mantle and heath was filled, then the kitchen, even the hallway and stairs. Everywhere, in our Before tidy house, there were bundles of flowers. Every day, Trace’s closest friends would arrive with begged, stolen or borrowed vases and make careful arrangements of the old and add the new arrivals. We’d be handed the notes and cards that came attached to each. Later, we put them all in a box. Saving them for? For later, I guess.
And as the flowers came into our lives, so our familiar family evening TV routine abruptly stopped.
We watched nothing. Nothing at all. In the days that turned to weeks (whilst I continued to count days) our TV sat, black and silent, in its corner. Given it had been such the centre of attention, I’m sure it was sulking.
Over that first weekend we avoided the news completely, but not consciously. We just didn’t watch the news. Consequently, I have literally no idea of the media coverage that first weekend, Day 2 and 3, Saturday 27th February 2016 and Sunday 28th February 2016.
Then, one night, as the After days turned to double digits, someone picked up the dusty remote and put the TV on. Purely and simply to gain some glimmer, some semblance of normality. After all, TV had been our family antiseptic to any day’s scrapes and scratches.
The problem was, as soon as the programme information faded, recalls and reminders flooded in. Every programme we watched was bathed in aching memories, each theme tune an incisive trigger for tears, for pangs of stomach-churning remembering. Of them both, sat on the sofa, with a TV supper or a takeaway. Of their yelps of laughter or grunts of dismay when they wanted to watch something else. Of their constant nattering and quips. Of their messaging whilst watching. ‘I AM watching! …What’d he say?’.
No one in our little extended cloud of a family of closest and newly found friends could stomach TV. For me, it felt like I was, for a few precious, forgetful seconds, riding the crest of a wave that would then violently pull me under, making me grasp for air and gulp in salty sea water.
I suppose you’d call this ‘shock’. The immediate after effects of traumatic bereavement. One thing was for sure, I wasn’t ready for Saturday night primetime, for comedy quizzes or Sunday night costume dramas.
Izzy’s photo of her last TV night in, 9th January 2016
Then one evening, whilst someone was casually flipping through channels of the never ending listings of agonising reminders, we happened upon ‘The Secret Life of the Zoo’.
It came with no memory recall. No heart aching triggers. It was new. It was about animals and people looking after animals. It was a quiet sort of programme, meandering gently between stories of zoo keepers and their care for their beloved creatures.
And so, we watched. We sat, we curled-up, a ragbag collection of numb bodies and fragile minds, stretched out on the living room floor or ensconced amongst sofa cushions. We watched in silence. We watched, glad that, for a few precious moments, we were somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t here.
Before and After 