That a mobile phone could be so precious...
So precious I was jittery taking it out of its cardboard box and plugging it in. Relieved, too, to see that it actually worked - the home screen lighting up, the 'battery charging' logo flashing.
After all this time.
Well, not so much time, really. Coming up to four years. Long enough.
I'd faffed about for a bit, not really sure whether I should leave it where it was, safely wrapped in a handkerchief, packed in a plastic bag, wedged in a square box that once held a watch.
But, decision made, I went delving among your videos, your books, the letters and cards - so many cards - your woolly black hat (the one you were wearing the day before...), your CDs, to find it and bring it back to life.
I left it while it got on with charging, made a cup of tea, ironed, kept returning to see if it was 'ready' yet.
Such a significant little phone.
Full of you - photographs and videos quickly, urgently, downloaded from it in the weeks after you left. I had become completely irrational, convinced they would 'wear out' if I looked at them on the screen too often. They weren't safe there.
I remember frantic calls to the phone supplier asking for replacement USB cables and the like, and a genuine feeling that I was racing against time, somehow, to save these last little pieces of you.
Now, of course there isn't a computer, laptop or memory stick in the house that isn't packed with those same images, those precious, precious photos and the videos that, in the darkest times, when I wonder whether you existed at all, show you so full of life and happiness and fun.
I kept the phone as a link to your life, I suppose. After all, I'd held that camera up and it had looked at you with its eye and captured you - a sort of physical connection then, between then and now, if that makes sense.
Anyway, button pressed, phone unlocked, it eagerly pinged into being after its almost-four-years hibernation and you, in turn, pinged on to the homescreen. You on a pebbly beach in Mull.
Tap tap, Scroll, Menu-File Manager-Images: and there they are, 141 of them. Photos. All you. Then videos - 18 in total. On the Isle of Mull Little Railway, with all of us being silly in that big daft holiday home, plinking on the piano, walking in the park.
Don't need to look. Just good to know they're still there. In their original box.
And suddenly, stupidly, I recalled another reason I'd kept it. Not just for the pictures or the videos.
Scroll, Menu-Messages-Inbox.
The first one had arrived at 2.24pm, February 12, 2008. Just a few hours after the ambulanceman had walked from your bedroom, taken my hands in his and told me there was no hope.
A message from someone close who had heard.
I remember being shocked at the speed that the news had travelled and moved that the sender had taken the trouble, had been brave enough, to get in touch.
Then came another and another.
And as police and coroners' officers and funeral directors came and went they kept coming.
It was only later that I read them properly. And then I devoured them. Voices from across a deep, wide canyon. Me on one side, sliding into darkness, they on the other, pulling me back.
Friends, colleagues, many close, but some from people I barely knew.
And most poignantly, as I read them now, a message from a colleague, a wonderful chap, a business editor on my old paper, who is now no longer with us.
Then, inevitably, I looked at the 'sent' messages - my replies, sent days later but preserved here too.
They are harder to read now.
They are broken.
They remind me of those early days and weeks.
The blackness, the loss, aching empty, empty arms. You just weren't there anymore, I couldn't find you and nothing made sense....
I put the phone down after reading them all and had to sit for a time.
How did we survive? I have no idea.
On hands and knees until we had the strength to sit, bent double until we had the strength to stand.....
We are, after all, programmed to survive. I realise that now.
Yet my own words on a mobile phone from nearly four years ago are proof, I suppose, that it does get better.
I never imagined it would.
I'll keep the messages. Even the ones that almost catapulted me backwards. I suppose because they've made me realise how far I've come since then.
You learn to live again, Thomas.
You don't know it's happening,
But you do...
xxx
