A long time ago, before I lost you for the last time, I used to mend your clothes. You became so attached to the things that you loved. So, like most of the things you owned then, your clothes were worn, not through age but constant use. I had always been very practical in my approach towards life, so when I saw them hanging up in your wardrobe the day you came to stay at home, it was a very natural reaction to want to fix them and make them new again.

I started right away, concentrating on just a few items: your jacket, your jeans. You seemed unsure at first, I think you’d grown to like the holes and the tattered, soft edges. But my meticulous needle work paid off when I saw that the clothes I had stitched made you stand a little taller. So I continued, and it became an occupation, a distraction from the unbearable truth that I could not fix you.

I suppose I just wanted to do something, anything. It was my own, feeble attempt to help you in the only way I knew how. You rarely spoke about how you felt, but when you did you described it as an itching, festering mass hanging in your chest, a clinging mist that would not clear. You said it was heavy. You said you didn’t know how it had got there, that perhaps you were born with it. I didn’t know what to say when you spoke of it that way, as if it were a part of you – I felt it was my fault, that I had unknowingly done something to put it there.

Whatever it was, you weren’t the same person when it took over you. Your eyes would look distant and glazed over. It was as if you weren’t really seeing anything that was there. You couldn’t register the things I would try to tell you, that you weren’t well, that you would get better if you took your pills and I would look after you. You kept saying that you didn’t understand anything. You just sat there, whether in the house or at the doctor’s office, looking at nothing. I used to ask what you were thinking, but you said you didn’t know.

You started to cut your arms with my kitchen knives. You said it made you calm somehow to remind yourself of your own fragility, and also of your human, physical substance. You said you felt so much pain that you needed to let some out from time to time. However hard I tried to stop you, to keep things out of your reach, you always found a way to hurt yourself. But I stubbornly believed that I could protect you from that final, ultimate act. That belief was a fine and delicate thread that I used to hold myself together.

You see, I thought that the mind was similar to a child that we have to feed and water, clothe and rest. I thought that if I did those things, it would grow strong. You were young, you still had growing to do. So I concentrated on taking care of your practical needs. But really, don’t we all need something more? I thought that extra thing you needed was love, so I gave it to you in the only way I knew how. But there was something else you were missing, something, I have slowly come to realise, that I couldn’t give you.

The body sheaths the mind, clothes protect the body. I’ve realised that by immersing myself in the task of mending your most outer layers, that I was only trying to conceal the problem, to make it invisible in the naïve hope that it would somehow become less present. You can’t dress things up and expect them to change. But back then I didn’t understand. I couldn’t.Despite its unravelling, I was desperately holding on to my fine, delicate thread.

They found you in the wood behind the house. When I found your note that day, I knew that is where you would be but my legs wouldn’t move to go and find you. I sat on the floor ofyour bedroom. I clutched onto one of your jumpers, drawing it to my chest and hugging it like I used to hug you when you were a child, smelling the fabric, your smell. And I prayed,for probably only the second or third time in my life, I begged God that afternoon.

They told me you were wearing some of my finest work; a pair of pale blue jeans with a hole in the left knee that I had patched up, and your cricket jumper, laced with hundreds of invisible threads that pulled together the old holes. I stitched that jumper many times. You used to tell me that it kept you warm. It’s odd, but I take a small amount of comfort knowing that. Even though, by the time that they found you, you were cold.

After you died, I could not pick up a needle or thread for some time. My knitting needles lay discarded, my sewing machine gathered dust. I packed away balls of wool, and reels ofthread that I had purchased for my next project, needles of all sizes, patches of fabric,thimbles. I sealed the boxes with tape and left them in your bedroom. I had no desire to fix anything. I had only ever wanted to fix you. And I grew to like holes, and soft, tattered edges. Like you, I took some comfort in letting clothes fall apart where they wished to, to not tend tothem. I didn’t care if people stared at me when I ventured out in public. My outside represented my inside, and for once I didn’t care.

Once everything had settled, it was not as difficult as I thought it would be to let go of your clothes. I packed them in bin bags and took them to a charity shop. I comforted myself with the thought that perhaps they could keep someone else warm.

Two years passed and my sewing materials continued to gather dust. But slowly, slowly, one hour after the next - and it took thousands of hours - some of my own tears began to heal. I got a little stronger, time started to mend me. I only wish you had given yourself more time, and the same might have happened to you. Those are the sorts of thoughts that come to me all the time, but they are thoughts no one wants to have, because thinking them doesn’t change anything, they just fill you up with sadness. There was one hole in the fabric of the world thatneither time, nor anything else, could mend. It was the one you left behind. But I learnt to live with that hole, very gradually.

You had not wanted to be buried, you wrote that you wanted your ashes to be scattered in the field behind the church, the one with the wild flowers. Some of your school friends had planted a tree there after your funeral, with a plaque saying “Sam’s tree”. At the time I had found the thought of your tree painful, something else to watch grow up only to die before it ever reached adulthood. But I was wrong, three years on and it looked strong and healthy. I liked to go and visit it each week, and talk to it as if it were you, and pick wild flowers to take back to the cottage.

It was spring and I had been to visit the field and your tree. I spent some time picking flowers, at that time of year it was snow drops and daffodils. I was walking back to the cottage through the churchyard, with a bunch of the flowers in my hand, feeling that you were with me. And then I caught sight of someone, at one of the graves, a boy, in his late teens. For the slightest of moments I thought it was you. The teenager was wearing a jacket, and I would have known that jacket anywhere – those elbow patches were the very ones I had stitched myself.

I walked up to the grave alongside him, and knelt down to lay the wild flowers I had picked.And I spoke softly,

“I’m sorry.”

He didn’t answer, he was still and quiet but I feel his sorrow and it made my heart ache. I couldn’t walk away, the sight of a grieving boy wearing your favourite jacket was enough to root me firmly to the soil. I wanted to take him in my arms.

I looked up to read the gravestone.

In loving memory of

Emily Gaffney

Loving wife and mother to Thomas and Poppy.

I knew that name, I had read about her in the local paper. The story had affected me deeply, as all stories like that do now that you are gone - they remind me of what happened to you. She had taken her life only a few months ago.

“Thomas?” I asked. He looked up.

“What do you want?” He asked, a faint trace of anger in his voice.

“I hope you don’t mind me laying these flowers for your mother,” I said, “I lost my son three years ago, and I know how it is in the beginning, I know about the hole it leaves behind.” I reached out to touch his elbow, feeling the soft leather of the jacket beneath my fingers.

“You don’t know anything,” he said, coldly, brushing me away.

“My son killed himself,” I said, “just like your mum did. They had the same illness.” He was quiet. We were still for a few minutes, the only sound was a gentle breeze blowing through the leaves of the trees surrounding the graveyard.

“You’re wearing his jacket,” I said, looking at the flowers.

“What?”

“That jacket was my son’s, one of his favourites actually. I gave it away after he died. I would know it anywhere. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“How do you know it’s his?”

“The elbow patches for starters,” I said, with a grin, “and I bet, if you look inside the front, on the left side, his initials are on the bottom corner, SB.”

Sure enough he unzipped the front, peering skeptically inside. His eyes widened as he saw the initials there.

“My mum got it for me,” he said, zipping it back up and crossing his arms against his chest, as if he was trying to hold something in. “She was always buying us second hand clothes. But I hated it, I wouldn’t wear it.”

“I’m glad you are wearing it now,” I said.

“It’s grown on me,” he said with a shrug, and I noticed some of the stitching on one of the pockets was coming lose. And some scratches in the leather, and the zip coming loose from the seam at the bottom.

“Well, I will leave you now.” I said, feeling suddenly as if I was intruding.

We both stood up, and he turned towards me as if he wanted to say something but his lips didn’t move. His eyes began to fill with tears, he blinked and one fell down his cheek. I didn’t even hesitate, I took him in my arms, I wrapped them around him and pulled him to my chest. You would never let me touch you towards the end, but he clung onto me tightly as he shook with it, shook with his grief and loss and pain. I felt your jacket between us, keeping him warm.

“Let me fix it,” I said, “please.”