the price of love

Music is an important element of the story here at The Price of Love.

There are several good options for adding music to a WordPress.com site. Copyright law prevents you from loading many mp3 files directly onto your site, but you can avoid those problems by using last.fm and playlist.com.

This post provides step-by-step user instructions to help you add music to your WordPress.com site using these two alternatives. I’m not a fan of sites with auto-start music, and so I’ve configured these instructions to avoid it.

You have to click on the links here to make them play.

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If you’re lost you can look – and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall I will catch you – I will be waiting
Time after time
- Cyndi Lauper 1984

The greatest song ever written about bereavement? Here it is.

This book is about bereavement and recovery. But what’s the difference, really, and how can you define that line?

Confusion. Long nights. Memories, almost left behind.

That’s it, you see, in a nutshell. You’d think that loss is the biggest problem in bereavement, and of course that’s true. But moving on again is just as hard.
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STOP PRESS:
I’m delighted to announce that this site has won a Blog of the Day Award for 29th April 2008.

* * * * *

The next morning, on our first day home, we returned to St Peter’s so that the doctors could examine Jenny.

They smiled thinly, but didn’t say very much, just telling us to await some improvement. Jenny took home a more powerful painkiller, Coproximol, and a new anti-oestrogen drug called Megestrol which would act to block the growth of cancer cells.

I didn’t know what to say to Jenny, since no real answers had been given, nor any solutions found. I think we both simply tried to blank it out as one more hospital visit over, and to carry on as best we could.
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A grimly dour air of lethargy befell us then. On the last and wildest night, a stray dog turned up at the villa and kept us all awake as it scratched at the front door for hours, trying desperately to escape the storm.

Another time, I’d have been sympathetic, but after all the months of tension it was too much.

I would probably have kicked the dog away for good if Sal hadn’t taken charge, fixed up a makeshift lead and taken it around to the neighbours before we left for the airport.

Eventually, we all arrived home, ragged from stress and lack of sleep. It seemed that we had only just walked through the door when the phone rang. It was my mum. My dad had found it hard to remember things recently, she said, so they’d taken him in to hospital for a check. To cut a long story short, they’d diagnosed a brain tumour, and would operate the following week.
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One day we set off for the northern mountains, following a route linking several of the wild and rocky places we had discovered during our first foreign holiday together many years before.

But the traffic had grown since then, and we got stuck behind coach after coach on the narrow twisting roads that day.
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You and me
We used to be together
Everyday together - always

I really feel
That I’m losing my best friend
I can’t believe
This could be the end
- No Doubt 1995

September 24th – October 8th 1996
Finally we left for Majorca with Tom and Sal. We stayed amidst unspoilt mountains near Pollensa, and after the pressures of the months before, it was marvellous to enjoy some warm sunshine and good company and just to spend our time playing on the beach with the kids.

Yet somehow I found it difficult to cope. First, William’s cousin Liam fell ill and kept us all awake at night, and then William himself developed a very irritating and repetitive machine-gun kind of cry, which wound me up all day.

I felt that I couldn’t relax, since I constantly had to keep a close eye on all three children around the pool. And there were flies everywhere.

Amongst all of our happy times there, it’s strange how I remember those little problems so clearly. Every baby cries, pools always need watching, and flies come and go, after all. But I think that with so much tension around us, spoken and unspoken, everything had begun to seem more difficult.
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