My 18 year old son Dylan died on a Monday night in 2019. His death came out of nowhere. A ‘traumatic’ death. When I woke up the next morning I knew Dylan was in the house somewhere. e had been for the last 18 years so why would today be different? He was in the next room, or downstairs making breakfast. It took a real and painful effort to convince myself that the events of the night before were real and that Dylan would never be anywhere again.

The ensuing days were blurred by tears and a sense of dislocation (I didn’t know it at the time but this is the first stage of the grief process: “shock/denial”).

We held Dylan’s funeral almost a month later. It was a grand affair in the former home of Neville Chamberlain and it wiped out my savings, but I think Dylan would have approved. It’s a big venue but it was packed. There was an incredible energy and unity in the room. It was a special occasion. My contribution was to read out two poems I had written about Dylan, ‘Past Tense’ asked people not to use the past tense to talk about Dylan (it still sounded wrong) and in the other I listed Dylan’s bucket-list accomplishments, but berated him for never having got a tattoo.

That night I wrote another poem where I tell Dylan ‘enough is enough, it’s time to come home’. A musician friend who knew Dylan since birth went home and picked up his guitar. We combined them into a song.

I continued trying to make sense of my feelings over the next months and years, into lockdowns and out again. Sometimes I felt very strange. It emerged that lots of the feelings I was trying to understand matched the various ‘stages of grief’ that you can read about.

This gave me the idea to create a collection of songs representing my experience of grief, from beginning to end. An achievable project (or so I thought!) I could throw myself into and in the process explore and better understand my mental turmoil.

Writing the songs and putting them into order was the easy part, the songs appear almost in the order they were written. Luckily I also had a couple of great musicians who were also invested in the project – my wife Alison and my best man Al.  The album would sound better if it had been produced by George Martin, but it isn’t bad for a first attempt and I’m very proud of it.

The first song is the one we began writing on the day of Dylan’s funeral – ‘Time To Come Home’. And the first word of that song is ‘Dylan’.

The second track, ‘Steel Umbrella’, is a pretty accurate description of how low my mood could get in the following months. I lived with some classic symptoms of poor mental health: lethargy, suicidal ideation, nihilism. At the time I thought these were indicators of how poor my mental health was, but looking back now, I’m struck by the fact that I still got out of bed each morning, turned up to work and went shopping. Because I was able to put up my steel umbrella, I could have been doing worse.

‘Fade Away’ tries to capture the uncanny sense I had that Dylan was still somewhere nearby, in the next room, just out of sight.

‘Floating Free’ is about feeling out of control and weightless, untethered from the world I used to inhabit.

A significant part of my experience of grief was a sense that things were wrong. Dylan shouldn’t be gone and it’s wrong to feel angry. I baulked at well intentioned remarks like ‘give it time’. Outwardly I’d probably smile but inwardly I’d scream “Time is what I haven’t got!” I made the fifth song ‘No Nearer Getting Over You’ wrong. The premise is wrong, you never ‘get over’ the people you’ve lost. The words ‘breaked’ and ‘forsaked’ are wrongly formed. Comparing my experience with 9/11 is wrong. The ‘armchair of my sorrow’ is a metaphor for the urge to cling to my sorrow, to not let go, which also feels wrong – some part of you has to move on at some point.

Part of the reason I wanted to stay in bed 24/7 was because in dreams, or in the half-reality of being half-awake, Dylan felt closer. It was easier to for Dylan to visit me in ‘The Grey Light Of Dawn’. Dreams are now the only place I can still spend time in Dylan’s company.

‘Numbered Days’ is written with more perspective. I remember the whole of Dylan’s life and the song has less bitter, more thankful tone.

The penultimate song is about remembering I still have a future, that I have to start ‘Learning To Live Again’. That I have other children who are growing fast and have exciting times ahead of them.

The final ‘Song For My Daughters’ is my advice to them: don’t suppress Dylan’s memory, mention him freely. Make sure that the important people in your lives know his name.

Although the album is called ‘For Dylan, Forever Ago’ (I couldn’t improve on Bon Iver’s beautiful phrase), it isn’t really ‘for Dylan’. He will never hear it. He had no musical ambitions. He couldn’t play an instrument, he didn’t like singing and hated being on stage.
So who is the album for? Well it’s for me of course, it was therapeutic to throw myself into this project and ‘bottom-out’ my emotions, but I’d really like to think that it’s also for the people who discover it and connect, like a message in a bottle.

Ben