Some time in the autumn of 2004 we had been invited to a Bereavement Tea at Sobell House.  M and Sue had come in the car together; I had walked over the valley and met them there.  We didn’t think we would know anyone and we felt a bit awkward, but as we came in we recognised the receptionist.  She greeted us and made us feel welcome.  Everyone was very kind and offered us cups of tea or coffee.

There were lots of bereaved relatives there, but we didn’t know anybody, so we talked together; well, Sue and I did, while M sat and drank his tea. A man who had just come in introduced himself as Bob and started to talk to us.  He said that he was a music therapist and that he had all sorts of musical instruments in his music room. People could come in and have a go on the different instruments.

He and M talked for some time while Sue and I chatted together.  She and I were concerned about how M was coping without Sharon.  He had loved her so much and he didn’t seem to want to talk about how he was feeling, especially not to us.  We wondered if music therapy might be a good thing for him.

* * *

I had forgotten all about that visit when I came across the letter from the Sobell House Bereavement Service.  It invited me to join a support group, but when I looked at the date, I had received it a long time before.  By now, it was May 2005 and I had received the letter in January.  I had been feeling so miserable, so powerless, so useless.  I was still teaching, but by then I knew that I had to leave the job in July.  I was angry and bitter, feeling that I had been pushed out of my job.  I was missing Sharon and wanted someone to talk to about it all.  I had tried to talk to my partner and to my family, but they had their own worries, their own sadness, and it was so hard to put it into words.  I felt that I had to pretend that I was OK even if I wasn’t, so that they didn’t have to worry about me.

Anyway, this letter gave me a phone number so I called Sobell House Bereavement Service.  I started off by making a polite and formal enquiry, but as I talked I felt myself getting really upset about it all.  I tried to talk normally, but I felt my voice go wobbly as I tried to explain. The person who answered the phone was very understanding and listened to me.  She passed me on to someone else who was very sympathetic and suggested that I come and meet Bob, the music therapist.  I wasn’t sure.  This wasn’t what I had had in mind.  I couldn’t see how music therapy would help me, but I phoned Bob’s number and made an appointment to go to see him.

I arrived on that day in May in some trepidation.  It was hard to come to Sobell House again, with all those memories.  I went to Reception and then Bob came to meet me and we went to the music room.  I told Bob what had been happening in my life and it did help to talk to someone.

Bob encouraged me to play some of the instruments and I tried the metallophone and made up a riff of repeating notes, a sad one, like a tolling of bells.  We talked some more and I told him about Sharon and how much I loved her, how much I missed her.  I told him about school and how sad I was to be leaving a job that I loved.  As I went he asked me to find the words that had been behind the music I had played.  I didn’t understand.  I had talked about things.  I had played some sad sounding notes.  What words did he mean?  I had made an appointment to see him again in a fortnight’s time, but for now it was back out there to try to cope with things from day to day.

Sometimes it was like walking through a black tunnel.  Dark all around.  No colour. No light. No hope. Just greyness and heaviness.  It was worse than the sadness and the times when I cried and cried, because it felt so lifeless, so helpless, so hopeless.  I was stuck in this grey nightmare with no way out.  I think David, the shepherd boy in the Bible who wrote the Psalms and later became King David, must have had some of those feelings because he tried to describe them in his songs:

Save me, O Lord, for the waters have come up to my neck
And I sink in the miry depths where there is no foothold.

I felt so alone.  I couldn’t believe that anyone would understand how I was feeling or be able to help.  It was all hopeless, lonely, grey and empty.

As I walked along I tried to think of other people who had lost their children.  How had they coped?  Which authors had written about the loss of a child?

I remembered the story of King Lear.  He has three daughters but only the youngest one, Cordelia, loves him.  He rejects her because she cannot express her love, but she returns to help him just at the time when he realises that she really does love him.  However, she puts herself in danger by coming to see him and he finds her just after she has been attacked and killed.  He cannot believe that she is dead, but as he begins to realise that he has lost her, he cries:

“She’ll come no more.  Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.”

I realised that that was how I was feeling, that sense of utter loss and helplessness.  As I walked along, I tried to find a tune to carry those words.  I don’t know where the rest of the words and the music came from.  They came out of nowhere, but they were hard to get right because they had to say it the way I was feeling it.  I walked on and kept working on it as I walked, until I had got it the way I wanted it.

Then I had to work out the notes on my guitar so I knew what they were.  I wanted to write it all down, not just the words but the music too.  I didn’t want to forget this song.  It felt too important.

The next week I took the song along to Bob and sang it to him.  He listened.  I could see that he was moved by it.  Also I think he was surprised that I had made up the whole song.  If I had written just the words I think he would have helped me to make up a tune to go with them.  But I had brought this song to him with the words and the melody just as I wanted them.

He picked up his guitar and played chords to go with the song.  I realised that it was a lament for Sharon.  It said how I felt in a way that I couldn’t have expressed in any other way.

It was a very important moment for me.  In some way being able to express those feelings lifted the load a little, lightened the darkness for a time.  I had condensed those deeply sad feelings into a song that held them all; something I could share with someone else.  It gave me a sense of achievement, but, more than that, it opened the door to another way of working through all those thoughts and feelings.

I didn’t realise it fully at the time, but now I knew that if I could write one song I could write others.  I wasn’t stuck forever in this grey nothingness; I could make other songs about the unbearable things which had happened, about the dreams and hopes I had lost; I could begin to express all those inexpressible feelings.  There was a way forward out of the darkness.