Longboat Key Memories

Billie Eilish’s breathy voice plays on my iPhone. It’s my method of blocking out the voices around me. It’s too peopley here, even with only about a dozen people within my ears’ periphery.

I can tolerate listening to Billie because I didn’t listen to her before Charlie. Everything I listened to for the first 50 years of my life is a potential trigger. Plus, Billie has a mournful sound that fits my mood right now. It almost feels as though she gets my pain, even though she couldn’t possibly.

Charlie loved music. In her last two weeks of life she made a playlist for her funeral. It’s about 150 songs, everything from ABBA to Erasure to the French National anthem and the Mongolian throat Warbler, the Hu. Her appreciation for variable genres always amazed me. She could listen to anything. She seldom listened to modern popular music though.

Last year I made a playlist of some of my favourite songs from over the years. Unfortunately, Charlie loved it and would often request that I play it in the car. Now I can’t listen to any of those songs without tears. Extreme’s More Than Words, Boston’s More Than a Feeling, Alphaville’s Big in Japan. All these songs and more turn my stomach and leave me floating in a painful fog. Love the songs. Hate the emotions that they evoke.

This is where I am right now. Longboat Key Florida, where my family have been visiting for nearly 35 years. I was actually younger than James is now when we first visited. When Carl and I started dating, he came and joined us here. I remember that was the year that Diana, Princess of Wales died. A few years later, James was born and we brought him down here. Then Charlie, too. So many memories of happy days as a family.

James and I have come down this year, thanks to my parents. Carl is doggy sitting as we couldn’t bring ourselves to put them in a kennel for more than the five days they will spend there in a couple of weeks.

As yet another “first” in the year after Charlie’s death, it’s been a mix of emotions. Happy families staying here are a bittersweet reminder of what we have lost. Each activity we do is an attempt to build new memories, to heal the chasm in our collective heart. Watching and listening to the rhythmic sounds of the breaking waves is therapy. I am trying hard to focus on that, and on the joy brought by spending time with James and my parents. But, as I have said before, Charlie is everywhere. She is constantly in our thoughts. So while we can change our scenery, we can never get away. She comes with us wherever we go and that means that the pain of living without her never leaves us. Thus, I lie here on a beach, in near idyllic circumstances, crying.