21 | Rain Sounds

I listen to rain sounds while I sleep. They play out of my phone’s small speaker, which rests on my bedside table, not far from my waiting ears. I didn’t always, but I do now. Part to drown out the sleeping sounds of my partner, part to distract the flow of thoughts that seem to turn on as soon as my head hits the pillow. It doesn’t sound like real rain, of course. It’s a recording of rain, so the cadence and pattern is right, but it lacks the bass of true raindrops hitting roof, and the direction is all wrong. Rather than an expansive orchestra of sound playing above my head, it is a tiny, slightly tinny, storm located and isolated to my bedside table. Still, it helps.

It helps so much, in fact, that I can also use it as the gentlest of alarms. I set the sounds to play for a time period of my choosing, usually eight hours, and at the end of that time they slowly fade away. This is enough to prod me awake. My subconscious catches the sedate decrease in sound and matches it with a gradual increase in wakefulness.

When I was a kid, I shared a bedroom with my twin brother. Bunks. One on top, one on bottom. We would occasionally swap to allow the other the strange giddy joy of sleeping at a higher elevation and the exclusive and expansive view of our bedroom that you could only see from the top bunk. However, in most of my memories, I am on the bottom bunk. It had its own perks. The odd sense of security from feeling slightly penned in, paired with the knowledge that my brother and best friend was sleeping right above me. There were no rain sounds here, and not even an alarm to wake us up. Instead, we had Mum.

She would wake us, gentle and kind, whispering a soft good morning. The thing I remember most though is her frequent use of a repeated statement: ‘Wake up slowly’. She would say it not just to the sleeper, but if the other twin was feeling more exuberant and awake that morning, she would tell them too, ‘let him wake up slowly.’ There was something so comforting about that, this permission to ease into the day, and to be met first thing with compassion and understanding. Now, on mornings when I wake groggy and sluggish, I’ll say to myself; wake up slowly.

As for the rain app I use, it can be somewhat unreliable. While it can work wonders as a peaceful alarm, it can also turn off abruptly in the night. That sudden shock of silence hits like a hammer. Immediate wakefulness, with a slight background of fight or flight for the moment it takes me to figure out what has happened. The sudden silence is deafening. Seeming to freeze time in place. It’s not until sound stops that you realise your awareness of its constant presence, and without it, the regular has dropped away to be replaced by the strange.

Recently, we lost someone close to us. It was a shock. That’s mostly how we’ve been describing it, as the person was not as old as you would hope for nor unwell to our knowledge. The experience went much the way you might expect. A tear filled phone call and then a race to a location, and the immediate deep dive into admin and logistics while the grieving process has barely begun.

For that first day, at least, it felt like the rain sounds had stopped.

The sudden shock of the news hits like a hammer, Immediate alertness, with a slight background of fight or flight for the moment it takes to fully process what has happened. The sudden loss is deafening. Seeming to freeze time in place. It’s not until normalcy stops that you realise your awareness of its constant presence, and without it, the regular has dropped away to be replaced by the strange.

And it is strange. Surreal. While death is normal, the experience of it isn’t. Or at least, it doesn’t feel that way. When you’re one of the ones that is this close to it, when the business of the death becomes yours, everything stops. “Real life” put here in quotation marks, gets put on pause. But of course, this also feels like the “realest” life will ever be.

It starts with phone calls, to let others know of the grief they are as yet unaware of. There are also services to discontinue, subscriptions to cancel. The passing on of knowledge that the rain sounds have stopped. Then for us, it was photos. So many photos. Boxes and boxes of photos for a whole life lived and captured on celluloid and plastic and pixels.

During this time, the flowers begin to arrive.

I’ve always had a hard time with flowers. As presents, they seem so temporary and overpriced. A small short obligation that can only end one way. However, now having gone through the experience of being surrounded by them, of having to scramble for more vases or convert other objects into temporary ones, of walking into a room and being hit by their scent, of losing count of just how many you have, I can see how in reality they are a stand in for all the people that are thinking of you. You are not so much surrounded by petals and stems as you are the affection of friends and family. And in that context, they are priceless.

Back to the photos, because we’re still going through them. Scanning and organising and distilling. The process is cathartic. A way to see the person we have lost. To spend time with them once more. To see all the many facets of their story. And there are many. So many. Not just young, old, and middle aged. But periods of people and fashions and experience. Times when they were lost and happy about it, and times where they were settled and happier still. Plenty of birthdays and christmases, but equally times of no true meaning or significance, just small snapshots where the context is lost but feel so much more real because of that. Good photos that make you laugh upon seeing them and bad ones that make you wonder why they even kept them. Square and rectangle. Portrait and landscape. Some faded and sepia tinged. Somewhere in there you realise how fortunate we are to have photos. To be able to see them move through their life like a slideshow. To be able to experience it along with them in a way where the sounds and smells feel just out of reach.

Amongst all this, decisions need to get made. Which photos will make the cut? How can we take this huge redwood of images and whittle it down into the shape of our person? Like most things, you do it by simply making one decision at a time. I should point out here, I was an assistant in the decision making process. The scanner and cataloguer to the maestro who was actually conducting this orchestra. A short list was made. Multiple ones. Focused on different periods and different relationships. The baton was then passed to me, and I went to work adding the many images to a video, timing them with music, resizing and reshaping until we had an artifact we would play for all of those who had loved her.

At the same time, I went to work designing the booklet. Another bit of admin amongst the grieving process and one I was happy to be able to help with. We wanted there to be colour and life to those few small pages. Not drab and dreary but a document that showed them at their best to help remind all those who would hold it that this was a celebration of a life, albeit one that will always be bittersweet. It came up well.

After that were the words. Again, I was merely a spectator and sounding board here. But the job of the words is a big one. For the eulogy, more phone calls were made, and questions asked and answered. All looking for memories. Funny memories, first memories, timelines and turns in the life of a person, how they moved through the big and the small with humour and grace and, occasionally, alcohol. This memory hunt bore fruit. The various recollections of those closest to her were collected into a single thoughtful, occasionally heartbreaking, but ultimately beautiful document. A recounting of her life in the words of those that were closest to her. A text documentary, full of talking heads and splashes of colour to help fill out the scenes for people who had only known one side to her; myself included.

Let’s move on to the books. Books are not a part of every funeral, but as far as I’m concerned they well and truly should be. All credit here goes to Holly who had the idea to pass on the library of our lost one. To take all these texts that she had read and loved and hoarded, and pass them out so all who attended could take a memento, or three, plus enjoy a good story.

A library is a hefty thing to move. Harder still is cataloguing it all, trying to come up with some kind of system so that on the day people had their pick of genres and authors, with the hope that there would be something there for everyone. What turned out to help were fruit boxes. We realised that if we could combine our transportation and presentation needs things would go a lot smoother, and so, if you are also planning to hand out the library of someone you hold dear on the day you celebrate them, let me tell you, fruit boxes are a godsend. Here’s what you need to do. Drive over to your local greengrocer, enter the store and stand awkwardly in the aisle until they notice you, and then ask if they have any boxes you could take, and when they ask how many, simply say as many as possible. Congratulations, you just secured yourself some fruit boxes. Now repeat this as many times at as many greengrocers as needed.

Here, my novice design skills could once more come in handy, as I designed a sticker to go on the cover page of each of the books, notifying the initial reader and any that would come after where this book had come from. I got five hundred stickers printed and we used each and every one of them. This is, it should be noted, too many books. We ended up only taking about three hundred to the actual event, which of course, was still far too many, but they did look great all laid out on the tables.

Then there were many other smaller details to coordinate. The fact of the matter is when you lose a loved one, aside from the admin of their death, you also have to become an event organiser. This event has a hard deadline, holds huge emotional significance, and ideally has everyone who ever knew them in attendance. So, no pressure.

It just started raining outside as I write this. I can’t hear the sound as it's fine and light. A steady spring drizzle. It will pass.

Those few weeks, between the rain sounds stopping and hosting the event, were all encompassing and tiring. Both the grief and the admin can’t stop. They need to run their course. That said, there was something nice about having such a singular focus. About putting all your attention and energy into this one strange project. I also got to bond even closer with people I’m already pretty damn bonded to. A new depth to the relationship, one hard come by, but sweet nonetheless.

The day went great. It feels strange to say for an event that holds the weight of sadness, but it did. Hugs were given, tears shed, stories told. The photos and music and words all did what you would hope they would, shared a life. Only a snap shot, that’s all we really get, but enough, I think, to show the spirit of the person. Books were taken. They live now in homes all around the country. Some will end up in op shops, but that’s good too. I hope the readers who find them will question the sticker in the cover and guess at its origin.

I couldn’t be more proud of Holly. I got to see the depth of her strength. I already knew she was quietly strong but she impressed me ever more with the grace of her fortitude. I have a hell of a wife.

We are now past that initial rush, that moment of shocked silence when the rain sounds stopped. Now, we’re in the next phase. One familiar but different. And there are moments when it all still feels surreal. When you have to stop and ask, did all that really happen? I think it shows just how good we are at pushing the knowledge of death to the back of our minds and then shoving it even further into the creases of our brain, like someone hiding candy wrappers between couch cushions.

But, as I said earlier, death is normal. In talking with others about this experience over the last few weeks, it usually incites them to tell their own stories of people they’ve lost. Their own tales of when the rain sounds stopped. The thing I find heartening is that for the most part, those stories aren’t mired in the hard slap of grief, but in the softer touch of acceptance. They talk about the person. They recount their own tales of the hard but cathartic process of saying goodbye to someone by having to plan a party. They laugh at the strange misadventure of it all. And you realise how wonderfully ordinary this all is. That this is the process.

They lived, we loved them, they left. The rain sounds stopped but now we get to wake up slowly.

Recently, I’ve had a new kind of alarm. It’s one that comes and goes throughout the year, but has been more consistent with spring’s arrival. A blackbird who sits on the fence outside our bedroom window and every morning warbles out their song. It typically goes like this; as the rain sounds fade away and the early light creeps through the curtains, as I shift and stir and wake up slowly, they begin to sing. Gentle and sweet and strangely hopeful.

Thank you so much for reading these Stray Thoughts and until next time give yourself the gift of waking up slowly.