Rob was the tall, snarky Irish boy who brought me and my husband together. Then, one day, he was gone

When people ask my husband and me how we met, we always exchange a look. At dinner parties, over lukewarm beers at barbecues, we know to catch the other’s eye. The question is a rope bridge between us, and both of us know not to sway it, or to glance down. The look means one thing. You know what to say, right?

After years of missteps, and people staring unblinkingly at us as we falter, we have learned what words to pick. The full story still has the power to hurt after many years. Instead we offer one sentence, no explanations: “Through a friend,” we say in unison, with smiles we hope are relaxed.

***

In the halls of the college arts block, the first thing I noticed about Rob was his height. The way he stooped to hide his stature, as shy, tall people do. In a long-sleeved top with a wine trunk and mustard sleeves, he looked like a children’s TV presenter. Fair-haired, serious, with a sibilant lisp. I mistook his shyness for arrogance, and steered clear.

Months later, we found ourselves on the same island. Every year, thousands of Irish college students head for the east coast of America in search of work. We were on Martha’s Vineyard, a Waspy idyll off the coast of Massachusetts. In summer, the population swelled with students, like me, working two or three jobs. Days off were rare, nights even more so, but at a party thrown by other Irish students, there was this tall boy again. We met up many nights after that, and bonded over music and books, eventually beginning a tentative, noncommittal relationship. He confessed that he found the island suffocating. America had promised adventure but this place wasn’t it.

At my 21st birthday party, he asked if I wanted him to stay on the island. The last year had been intense and distracting. I craved unpredictability, the sea, new people and experiences, and I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s summer but my own. So he took the ferry and went to Boston. The summer was over too fast and suddenly I was back to Dublin’s autumn gloam, to my night job in a cinema, and to college, where I bumped into Rob again. We circled each other for months. After one evening of conspiratorial chats, we ended up at the cinema. In the dark, I wondered what we were waiting for; why we kept each other at a distance. Afterwards we drank beer and laughed a lot, the hard edges melting away.

College finished, we took the first jobs we could get, then he moved into the tiny cottage I lived in without much discussion. There was barely space for one person, let alone two, especially one so chaotic as he was, so undomestic. His turntables occupied a corner under bookshelves, where he endlessly practised beat-matching, and our record collections amalgamated. At night, he worked late shifts selling gourmet sausages to drunk people in Temple Bar. Every weekend, he arrived home at dawn and fell instantly asleep in our single bed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sinéad with Rob in Dublin in 1997. Photograph: courtesy of Sinéad Gleeson

I always thought he’d be a writer. He carried a tattered hardback notebook everywhere. The spine had come away from the binding, but the pages were intact, full of passages and drawings. There were poems, too, and he liked to recount how he once got talking to Allen Ginsberg after a reading in Dublin and was flattered when the poet clumsily hit on him. When Rob left Martha’s Vineyard, I had given him my phone number on a scrap of paper, and later found it tucked among that notebook’s pages. Back then – for reasons I don’t remember – it was my habit to sign my name with celestial flourishes. The letters orbited by a moon, stars and a ringed planet.

Few people enter a relationship knowing precisely what they want from it. There were many brilliant days and nights, of talks, bed, parties, but after we’d passed the year-mark, I knew on some level that this – us – could not last much longer. The arguments increased, I gradually tilted away from him, and the distance widened. We parted after two years, but remained good friends, still swapping records and stories. A few months later, he went to San Francisco, where he and his friend S shared an apartment. Rob’s birthday was four days before mine, and that year a card arrived, bearing a painting of John Coltrane as a religious saint.

Another autumn rolled around and after they moved back from San Francisco, Rob moved into a flat with S, who composed music, produced bands and had a fondness for old synthesisers. Our friendships overlapped again, and there were nights out and house parties. S and I were mutually intrigued, but wary of the triangulation, of upsetting the intersecting friendships. I confided in Rob about S, how much I liked him. He had always been capable of grandiose snark, and a rarely displayed mean streak. Now it resurfaced, almost with glee, and I have never forgotten his response: It would never work. You’re too incompatible.

He was wrong, I knew that then. Felt it with every cell. Yet I was not at all surefooted as I picked my way towards S. When the conversation went a certain way, when our heads leaned too close, we inched back into neutral zones, or talked of our mutual friend.

After months of circular complications, S and I finally got together on a Thursday in the summer. We talked all night, all day, unceasingly. Everyone should have one night in their life like that one. The next morning S-and-I were barely a day old but something had changed. We parted reluctantly, with him homeward bound to the next county for a family party that weekend.

***

When Saturday comes around I am working at a music festival. The loose arrangement I have with S is to meet up afterwards, when he returns to the city. All day S is my only thought. I dial the number of his family home, 60km from where I am, to make a plan. I feel something that I haven’t for a while: an electricity, a fizzing in the bones, that longing to see someone. How did this happen?, I think. Someone hands me a beer. The festival whirls around me, the lights flicker, and a man who sounds just like S answers the phone. His brother says he has gone back to the city, earlier than expected. I know he doesn’t own a mobile, so I ask how to reach him, alarmed that because of crossed wires we will miss each other that night.

Never have I wanted to forget a conversation more than that one, but I remember every single word

“Any idea where he’s gone, maybe I can catch h–”

“Well, a friend of his had an accident.”

“Oh no! What happened?”

“I’m not sure, it was all a bit sudden.”

“Which friend?”

“Do you know a guy called Rob?”

I don’t know why I asked the question about which friend, but I already feel a rising dread. The sentences keep coming, the call continues, my heart rate escalating. Talking from the middle of a field to a person I’ve never met. Never have I wanted to forget a conversation more than that one, but I remember every single word:

“What? Is he in hospital?”

Words come faster now.

“I’m so sorry…”

I really don’t know what’s coming.

“What happened?”

This moment of before.

“I’m sorry. He’s dead.”

The world bends backwards, a sinister hallucination. I drop the drink in my hand. In a field full of thousands of strangers, somehow I end the call, howling into the dark. Primitive shrieks. I dial my parents’ number and my mother later will say that she thought I was being attacked. It feels that way. Assaulted with terrifying words. Someone drives me back to the city and I eventually locate S, and the friend who was with Rob when he died. Details emerge that are horrifying and senseless. A story so full of bad luck that it’s hard to believe it could ever happen.

Rob had accompanied a friend who was going to view a new flat. Adjacent was a tarred flat roof and he climbed out, imagining it as a great stage for positioning turntables, the site of summer parties. It gave way, and he fell into the derelict building below, hitting his head on the way down. The distraught friend tried to climb after him, at her own peril, and knew the moment she saw him that he was dead. Our collective grief is immense, but for her, the visual memory from that moment is terribly cruel, an additional burden.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rob DJing in Ireland in the summer of 2000. Photograph: courtesy of Sinéad Gleeson

On the last day of his life, Rob didn’t get out of bed until 5pm, a detail that has never left me. Would he have done things differently if he’d had any sense this was to be his last day on Earth? He couldn’t have known, buried in duvet folds, that the clock of his life was counting down.

My parents, S and I visit Rob’s family. Their grief is enormous and distressing. Everyone is dazed. Screaming silently, making endless cups of tea. Grief is bewilderment. Grief is circling rooms and talking to unnamed relatives. Grief is sluggish time, staring at strangers on the street and thinking how can you act like nothing’s happened?

For some reason, I expect him to be upstairs. Recuperating like a convalescent, laid up with flu, or a bandaged limb. Someone steers me from the hall and with one swift right turn, there is his body. (Too soon, I think, wishing I’d had the walk upstairs to prepare.) My legs go from under me, a mini demolition, and my mother holds me up. I notice an awful sound in the room, and everyone trying to stand still, all eyes turned my way. It takes a moment to realise the noise is coming from me; my mother squeezes my hand, urging me to keep it together. I don’t know what else to do, how else to be.

Perhaps there is another ending... I imagine him back in San Francisco, making music, smoking on a fire escape

The undertaker has dressed him in his favourite vintage shirt, one bought during that hot summer bussing tables in San Francisco. There are photos all around the room: the pudgy childhood smile, a teenage version sulking in a family shot, the summer of bleached hair. A timeline that has now stopped, abrupt as an arrow. He looks like him, just asleep. Long legs, boy hips, directional hair. Rob.

But this is an unheimlich version of the man I knew. And his shoulder… That’s what gives it away. I know the swell of that clavicle, the drumlin of bone, which now juts strangely, broken for sure. I pull my hand away as if scalded. They have made an effort to make him look symmetrical, composed, but then I notice it: the wad of cotton wool at the back of his neck, a pillow of sorts, too small for his head. Everything about it unnatural.

As is always the case with funerals, there is a lot to organise, decisions to be made. Music was his obsession. His taste was varied and impeccable: Fela Kuti, Zappa, techno, Ninja Tune, Orbital, Funkadelic. How could we possibly represent him in a handful of songs? A priest arrives to discuss the funeral and I know Rob would hate this. This man who never really knew him, cobbling together crib notes for a eulogy with no meaning, all pious insouciance. We begin offering our suggestions, and Rob’s father plays a song by Bob Dylan, the singer his son is named after. He is heartbroken and the song amplifies just above the level of his quiet cries, but the priest objects to it. Even now, years later, it feels heartless and his reasons escape me.

When we were a couple, Rob and I discovered many musical overlaps. One was Nick Cave, and he bought The Boatman’s Call for me, which we listened to on repeat. In the long history of album opening tracks, Into My Arms ranks highly. With its implored chorus of guidance, of wanting someone you love to be safe, it seems to me like an obvious suggestion for a mass. It’s almost out of my mouth when I remember the opening line. I look at the priest, remembering his earlier dismissal, and am certain that he will not approve its context. What to do, what to do, what to do?

Someone presses play and we sit in an anticipatory circle, waiting for the solo piano to give way to Cave’s sombre voice:

I don’t believe in an interventionist God

But I know, darling, that you do.

Five notes pass and I decide I will not let this man – a stranger to us and our sorrow – reject it. I fake a coughing fit and hack like a tubercular Victorian, all over those two gorgeous, declarative lines.

'Ways out of the darkness': books for helping with loss Read more

That night, the house is quietened down to the obligatory quota of close friends and relatives. Alone in the room, I look at him: his quizzical face, problem skin, lisped mouth; his long body, a still hyphen. Someone leans on my back and I turn to comfort them, but the room is empty. It feels as real as the weight of a person. I have no explanation. In the following weeks, this happens twice more when I’m alone, and again at a Lee “Scratch” Perry gig. In a job years later, an unnerving colleague tells me I have “a gift around newly dead people”, something I am slightly reluctant to accept, or believe.

***

Before Rob’s death, I was already certain about S. The trauma of what happened drew us closer, and we have remained together ever since. Those first months were intense and electric, but blighted by loss. We may resist our how-we-met story, but it is the story of us, despite how bound up with sadness it is. This new thing that came to be has endured, and without our beloved friend it would never have happened. Our son has Rob’s middle name and we talk to our children about him. I regularly speak to his oldest sister, who was a teenager when he died. The world turns and another year passes without Rob in it. All the places he never went, the sisters he never saw grow up. Our lives all went on, but his was recalled, over in a moment. Perhaps there is another ending: a parallel life where he fled the country; not gone but somewhere else. I imagine him back in San Francisco, promiscuous, making music, smoking on a fire escape. I see his tall spine moving easily across Haight-Ashbury, weaving up and down those hills, ducking under the Bay Bridge, and out of the city lights.

• This is an edited extract from Constellations: Reflections From Life by Sinéad Gleeson, published by Picador at £16.99. To order a copy for £12.99, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

If you would like a comment on this piece to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).