Joe's stuff

Today I tidied and moved around the the stuff in the garage. I opened one of the boxes of Joe's clothes to look at them. It's normal of course to smell the clothes of your dead child in the hope that you're transported back to when they were alive; even just for a few seconds. There's a technique. You cover your mouth and nose with the item of clothing and take deep slow breaths. Never breath out through the mouth in case the clothes get contaminated with your own breath. Shut your eyes and just breath in and out slowly. If you can do this calmly it's almost as though particles form inside your body and build a three dimensional image of your child. I can smell the warmth of Joe exactly and it's not weird, it's just unbelievably beautiful and unbearably sad to the point of being painful; but worth it. I went back later to do it all again and take pictures. It's been pretty fucking grim.