Oh now feel it, coming back again
Like a rolling thunder chasing the wind¹
Can’t quite believe it’s been 17 years without Sarah. Maybe because it hasn’t been – she’s been a constant presence, a memory, a dream – an echo that wouldn’t let me forget her even if I tried,. But it feels so different this year, in so many ways, and on so many levels.
Firstly, I’m dealing with cancer myself now – my own and the cancer that took my mum’s life on 26th December. I’ve been in the same ward that Sarah was treated in, at the Western General, several times now for my own treatment, and for mum’s less recently – seen the Christmas trees, the seasonal sprinkling of cheer that made the place less dark. The staff always seemed amazing, but so much more so when you see them as a patient. So her story echoes into mine, they start to bleed together. I remember her talking about her own mother while on that ward, too, and wonder what she would have said about mine.
And secondly, the Monday after the chemo infusion is when I get hit hardest with side effects. Sometimes even getting out of bed is too much. But memorial promises are promises – the very least I was prepared to do was have Veronica drive me on the route, but when my energy returned around 4:30pm, I knew I just had to jump on it, and go do the memorial alone – in the car this time, just for safety.
Doing the route in the car lets me play music, of course, and I stuck on albums we used to listen to, as I drove up to the hospice at Frogston Road. Music that invokes happy memories of singing in the car on the way to see a gig in Glasgow, or on the way back from a game. Then I arrive at the hospice to start the drive, look up at the window as I did that night 17 years ago, not knowing she was already gone, and head back out onto the road with Lightning Crashes spinning around in my head, and the feeling of Sarah close.
Only, the song’s meaning cuts through me this time – I can’t separate the words about a mother dying from how I heard it before. I can’t focus only on Sarah. Then I hear her whisper, “You don’t have to…”, and I feel her hands on my shoulders. For once, its not a ride of freedom and liberation, but of sadness and regret, and I’m not alone in that regret. Sarah moves from being the escape from confusion in the song, to being the angel who opens her eyes. For once, I’m allowing her to look after me. And that is remembering her too.
When I’m home, I’m so tired I can’t write. The words won’t form. Later, the whisky tastes of ashes and electricity – another gift from early in the chemotherapy cycle. We didn’t even put a Christmas tree up this year, so there’s no ceremony of turning it off when I get home – but we have a small one which I decorated with my mother in her last days, and we let the automatic timer turn it off, and don’t turn it back on again for this year.
My mum’s name will be inscribed on two stones later this year – with my father in Meigle, and with her parents in Garmouth. When I’m able, I plan to ride a motorcycle to visit them both, bring the road to them. And I think Sarah will ride with me when I do that… still being a light for me, still chasing the wind behind me.
This year was never going to be about giving Sarah a ride home again, about bikes and wind and liight. It’s been a year of darkness, and I needed light. She was always a light in any darkness for me – and she still is. Reminding me the road still stretches onwards, there are still bikes to ride, and that she’ll be riding with me, wherever I go.
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- Lyrics in italics from “Lightning Crashes” by Live, a song I sing to myself every year when I ride to remember Sarah.
For those that didn’t know her, this is what I wrote after she died: https://www.skirnir.com/seolta/sarah/
All my posts about Sarah are saved here now: https://www.skirnir.com/seolta/