The emptiness of silence...

Matt July 2006,

 I am sitting in the summerhouse at the top of the garden. You would have loved it out here.
Your grandad had given us some money in January 2010, and we decided to buy something really special......only he never lived to see it being erected as he died two months later.
   The sunlight, which is lower in the sky in the late afternoon of a waning July, is filtering through the windows and making dappled shade on this as I write.
I am writing in a notebook sitting in the comfy armchair, with the door open.      

 The sounds are coming in.....some faint, some clear........
A blackbird's song breaking out at intervals, wood-pigeons roo-cooing, muffled traffic, a sudden flapping of wings in the maple, and a fluttering in the apple tree.
Two bumble bees are humming amongst the ground cover plants.
Large patches of blue sky are being eroded by high cloud gradually thickening in the west.
     Rain is expected in the morning.
The house sits as it  always has done, at the end of the garden. The house in which you once lived from the age of five, after we moved into the area, until you went to University, then began your first job, eventually being married in your 24th year of age.          

So many memories are contained within it's walls,
So many here in the  garden......
Only now there is the silence of you......................
Where once there was the presence of you...........
          On 10th September this year, it will be the 9th anniversary of that fateful night which saw you and Chris, our church pastoral minister, tragically taken from us, too soon.

Some things time can never heal.
Oh we learn to live again, to breathe again,
But as we begin to drift towards August, the rowan berries are turning red,
My heart aches with missing you.
My irreplaceable son.
          September is coming.
  Next year would have been your 40th birthday, and next September 10, 2016, 10 years since that awful, awful night when we had a phone call sometime after midnight, from the traffic police.
       Some things are so deeply embedded in our memories that time can never erase them, nor blot them out.
                We bear a scar forever your dad and I, your brother, and all who ever loved you, even now.
Then, as now, the memory will surface almost as if it had only been yesterday.

And oh how I long to see you again,
To hug you,
Feel the aliveness of you,
Hear you laugh...........

One more year without you,
And the rowan berries are turning red............