Letter to Matt at the beginning of the 7th year since he's been gone.

Dear Matt, 

Another Christmas and New Year have come and gone. As I packed away the Christmas tree into it's box, I was thinking how long it was since I first bought it. It is a lovely imitation spruce, and still looks good today. Well, I finally remembered it was 1999! You were in your first year of work at a Computer Company, and had brought your future wife to stay with us all for Christmas. I have it on the photo of us all, on Christmas Day, alongside your young brother, the two of us, and you and the one you would marry in November 2000.    

   It still looks good today. After 14 years. How can it be so long?It seems like another lifetime away now. I cannot remember being completely happy since then. And it is a fallacy to say that "time heals" . How could it? We bear the scars of grievous loss. A parent should not have to lose their child, Matt. But thousands do, across the world. I do know that the passage of time helps us to learn how to cope. How to begin remember, without a total collapse  into the maelstrom of the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic event.  

 

I read the blogs of other grieving parents, 

I find this touching, as it is like being part of a community which is seeking to make sense of their lives here and now. How to go on. How to remember their children. It is that remembering which is so very important to all of us, it keeps them alive. 

Some of them contact me, and some write comments, which I find very touching. The fact that they can remember you Matt, in the words I write and the photos I post, is a comfort to me. 

I looked for your words that I found after you died, kept in a box of odds and ends, alongside a photo you had taken on New Year's Eve 2005. 

Our first New Year's Eve without you was so completely awful I wanted to howl and curl up under a duvet. The weather outside was equally stormy, matching my mood. There was no comforting me. I felt as though my insides were ripped out. 

Yet, today, after 6 complete years without you, and it will be 7 in September, We are learning that we can go on living and enjoying some of what our lives have to offer. 

But, Matt, as I packed away the tree, I was thinking of you and my heart lurched. 

Your words on that New Year's Eve are now so poignant. You were never to see the end of 2006.      

So, I post your photos, and the ones you took, and like me, you had a camera handy.    

So, Matt, there will always be that sense of missing you, underlying our walk into 2013.
 Forever loved, forever remembered.
Mumxx

New Year's Eve 2012

For the past 6 years  we have shunned the razzmatazz of New Year's Eve, because it represents for us the end of another year without Matt. 

This year we had a break with tradition and went to see the new film of The Hobbit. Matt was a great fan of Tolkien and loved the cinematic productions of The Lord of the Rings. 

In fact, his brother chose a track from the last film in the trilogy to be played as we came to the end of his committal at the local crematorium.  

He would have loved this new film! It made us smile to think of it. 

Then we had been invited to spend the evening with a friend and her two teenagers and their noisy gaggle of buddies. 

They were in two teams, the daughter heading up one and the brother the other. It was good to be in their raucous competitive company. The quiz had been compiled as a quiz night, and there were prizes on offer! Each section was different, and during the course of the evening, these included hilarious mimes, and attempted sketches, to illustrate the clues. 

We always hosted a New Year's Eve party here in times past, and before Matt was of an age where he went to other venues. These were times of laughter and silly games. Matt bringing some of his friends to join in. His younger brother Alan, had one or two of his own.              

  Now Alan is married and his next child expected in 6 weeks time. Samuel, now 15 months old, reminds us so much of the uncle he will never know. He has a sunny, smiling face, and for the moment at least is of a placid nature. Much as Matt used to be at the same age.          
It can bring back such memories of how it felt to hold him close and sit and play with him and his toys. A tug on the heart of loss.

Matt at half time at his beloved
Aston Villa game,
 2003.  

So here we stand at the gateway of 2013, and we go on. But we are going towards a day somewhere in the unknown future, when we will all be reunited alongside the One who holds Matt safe, and who is our constant strength and hope,the One he followed and loved, Jesus.        
So I finish with the words from the evocative song which filled that packed chapel as we said our final goodbye. For us, Matt had

Best man at his friend's wedding. 1999

made his journey, his "ship" metaphorically speaking, had taken him home.  
Into the West. from Lord of the Rings 

Lay down
Your sweet and weary head
Night is falling
You have come to journey's end

Sleep now
And dream of the ones who came before
They are calling
From across the distant shore

Why do you weep?
What are these tears upon your face?
Soon you will see 
All of your fears will pass away

Safe in my arms
You're only sleeping

What can you see
On the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?

Across the sea
A pale moon rises
The ships have come
To carry you home

Dawn will turn to silver glass
A light on the water
All souls pass

Hope fades
Into the world of night
Through shadows falling
Out of memory and time

Don't say
We have come now to the end
White shores are calling
You and I will meet again

And you'll be here in my arms
Just sleeping

What can you see
On the horizon?
Why do the white gulls call?

Across the sea
A pale moon rises
The ships have come
To carry you home

And dawn will turn to silver glass
A light on the water
Grey ships pass
Into the West


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsDji3Z7t3s

When you walk through a storm........hold your head up high...

 My dear, dear Matthew,
A door opened once again this last week, unbidden and unexpected, back to the depths of grief I felt almost 6 years ago. A suddeness, a shaking, a dropping into the dark chasm of pain.
It swept me off my feet and squeezed the breath out of my body.
Maybe it was worse because I wasn't well for a few days and spent sleepless nights propped up with several pillows unable to breathe properly until the vicious 'flu like symptoms abated.

 Several days earlier we had welcomed into our home for a few days, your widow and her new husband, also called Matthew, and spent a few days getting to know him a little better. You would like him. He is a gentle soul. And it could not have been easy for him to come and stay, where there are photos of you all over the house. 

He met once again your brother and his wife and 1 year old son, when we had a family get together  last Sunday. 

But, and I say it honestly, after a while it became more apparent to me, as they left to tour around other places for a few days, that I was beginning to feel more emotional and painful. (Maybe the onset of the flu like virus did not exactly help.)

 When the house became quiet again, it felt strange. 

Not something I could control, which is always a scary place for me. Why? I asked myself ? Why now? 

Ok I wasn't well, but it was deeper than that. 

A door had been opened once again, into those awful days of early grief, when tiredness and pain were constant companions. This new relationship which has presented itself, only serves to highlight the fact that it is not you by her side anymore. Even when I know that, and accept it, wholeheartedly without question, liking him very much.      

It is a gaping hole, that can never be filled, or cemented in, even the depths of which can never be plumbed, nor healed, it goes down into the abyss, endless, vast and alone. 

You are gone. 

Gone from me, 

My child that I bore,

That I so loved and will do forever,

From your first breath 

Till your last 

When I was not able to hold you in my arms and wish you goodbye, 

And others gathered your broken body 

From that nightmare scene,

Whilst we were still unaware........

Then a Silence of you..............

No Longer a presence of you............

   

           

But our love for you will never die, and you will never be forgotten.

Forever your mumxxxx

A different life.........

My lovely son, contemplating as you sit by the candle light in your garden, the year that we lost you......
We are this week contemplating a visit from your widow.
Only she is bringing with her a new husband, also called Matthew. And her surname has changed.
I know that you met him, years ago, at the Christian festival Soul Survivor, and it is good that he knew you briefly.
She now lives and works in America, at the same Christian College as her husband in Dallas.

It is what we prayed for her, after the devastating loss, that she would one day meet someone again   with whom she could share her life.
And God has a way of being surprising at times!

BUT
We are facing a whole new different relationship, and with the sense of pleasure that we have to see her remarry and begin a new life, comes the immediate knowledge that it was because you died that the whole of our lives were altered and shattered on that awful night.

We are always in the process of rebuilding, and trying to make sense of where we are now.
But it is the "where we are now" that has to be faced each day that goes by.

This is another of those "first" experiences, in the same category as birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas.  

SO we greet a new couple this weekend for the first time, whom we have not seen since last year. Now almost married 12 months, and will negotiate the fact that it would have been your own Wedding Anniversary on Sunday. It seems so incomprehensible to grasp.
A bit like about to negotiate a minefield.........you never know how you are going to cope, or what will happen......except we have to go through it.

I miss you.

I found a letter someone had  written to us just after you died,
And I quote from it now......

" I struggle to make  sense of the death of Matthew and why you should have to go through such grief, But at the same time, I give thanks to God for the tremendous person Matthew was - his faith, his personality, his desire to serve God wholeheartedly."

We go on, without you, this weekend into territory as yet uncharted, holding Jesus' hand.  
May the Lord watch over you for us.

Mum  xxx




    

Seven autumns,seven winters............. 2006-2012

Here I am again, thinking of you..........

Since you left, we have had seven autumns and seven winters,

Six springs and six summers. 

The autumn you left is remembered as a blur of pain, 

Punctuated by beautiful sunlit skies, and glorious sunsets, 

After the hottest summer we experienced in years. 

It seemed so incongruous, to live with all that beauty 

And all that vibrancy, 

When you could not see it. 

And we could never see you again. 

I took refuge in the solace of our garden,

It was one of the only places that I felt really safe. 

And in the passing of the years and seasons until now, 

I have spent hours out there................

I have changed the garden, just as I have changed, 

Only I wanted it to be a place awash with colour 

Reflecting the way that I always think of you 

Smiling, laughing, caring. 

So if you could see it today, 

I know you would love it. 

I painted this from a photograph I took 4 weeks after you died. It was a day that made me feel, just for a little while, that I could go on living.  

                      I had gone into the local park to find somewhere to be on my own and sit awhile. 

The sunlight began to filter through the trees and just for a short time, I felt that I would, maybe, be able one day to enjoy the beauty around me, without the crushing weight of loss.  I did not immediately set to work as I was so devastatingly tired.

I began in the depth of that winter of 2006/7 and finished it by March 2007, when it won  a place in the Local Sutton Artist's exhibition. You would have been so proud.  

                         

It is framed and on the wall in our lounge, a reminder that now after all this time I can enjoy beautiful days without the agony I felt then, because those days only served to remind me that you could not share them. 

You loved the park, and you also took photos there.              

Matt's photo taken in summer 2006, Sutton  Park. 

The autumn colours  appear on the leaves of the cherry tree planted in memory of Matt, in the grounds of the school opposite our house. The school he attended till he was 11 years old.

So, Matt, as the evenings now begin to shorten with the onset of winter, and dusk descends at 5.00pm, as your dad and I were tidying up the garden for it's winter sleep today, I thought of you. Seven winters and seven autumns, we miss you.
Love mumxx  

Wearing your name. October 5th 2012

 Dear Matthew,

We have had a busy couple of weekends recently. Your brother celebrated his 28th birthday on 29th September and on 5th October his own son reached his first birthday. So we thought of you, as we always do, each and every day that goes by, and wished you could have been there to celebrate both events. 

Samuel had a party the day after his birthday, and it was a beautifully sunny autumn day. Saturday October 6th. We had travelled down for his actual birthday being greeted by his huge smile as we arrived at the house. 

But the sense of you not being there was very real. It is so hard to explain how in such a happy occasion I can feel the sharp pang of grief mixed in. Your nephew is a happy, generally laid back, child. And you will never see him on this earth.  

1st Birthday party for our grandson
 Samuel Robin Sellers

 It seems so long ago now, your first birthday, but the memories are stirred and I have to express how I feel. As I write it is a glorious October morning with crisp, sharp light and changing colours on the trees. We arrived home again late yesterday afternoon. But, Matthew, I found a tangible way, for me at least, of taking you with us to Samuel's party weekend.
Last year your Graduation tee-shirt was returned to us with several more of your things that your young widow thought we would like, before she went to live, and remarry, in America. I found it in the bottom of a cupboard, when I was looking for something else. Your dad had put it there so I wouldn't see it and be distressed.      

Matthew on his first  birthday. April 23rd 1977 

 I took it out and held it close to me, and the tears welled up unbidden. I eventually took out the other things and I put them in the wash. As they dried outside on the line, I looked again at your tee-shirt and once it was ironed, I put it on. It was comforting to wear your name. So I packed it in the overnight bag, and wore it to sleep in on Friday evening. I am wearing it as I write this, the morning after the birthday party.    

Graduation tee-shirt.

So, Matthew, when I go to bed I wear your name, next to me.

Love you always and forever,

Mumxx

Portsmouth University 1998.

September 10th 2012. 6 Years on.

 Stephen. Summit of La Chapelle St Jacques.
Cavaillon, Provence France.
9th September 2012

Dear Matt,

Your dad and I are in South West France. Tomorrow we are going to the old Cathedral here to light two candles. One for you and one for Chris. 

We don't know how we will feel, except that already today, we know we are going to have to face the inevitability of another anniversary of that tragic night 6 years ago.

We have talked of you often during the two weeks that we have been working our way from North to South West arriving in Provence 5 days ago. 

You would love the sunshine, the heat and the blue, blue skies...........

But there is one thing I know that will never ever change, 

Wherever I am in this world, you are not. 

Whenever I long to talk to you, there will be no reply.

Whenever I long to see you, your absence is profound.

To hear you say, "I love you mum" when I desperately, desperately need to know, and cannot. 

To feel your arms enfold me, when they never will again

To have those discussions that spiralled up and went nowhere as we disagreed! 

Yes, Matt, even that! 

We who love you always and forever, walked into a parallel world the night you left, and walk in it still. A world that forever changed and altered. 

A world in which we walk without you, and wish you were here every day. 

A world where other people's loss touches us more deeply. 

Because we loved you so much, our hearts were shattered, and although we have to go on, we will forever bear the scars which hold the shattered pieces together. 

A mark of the depth of our love for you. 

So, Matt, until we meet again, we hold on to the memories of you, and walk on.............        

Thinking of you Matt
Love mumxx

Matthew Milford Sellers
1976-2006