It was a few months after you died that dad and I finally came to clear the house.  The plan was to sell it. It wasn’t big but its three bedrooms and decent garden would make it a good home, perhaps for a family with young kids.

It had been standing empty and silent for weeks over the summer, but now the air carried that freshness of seasonal shift and it was as if this was the signal that it was time to get the house ready for selling.

So one weekend in late September we arrived to sift and sort, pack and remove. But that’s not how it felt. For me, this was an audit of your life, a peeling back of the years; a meditative exercise in remembering and wondering. Your voice seemed to be still held there, absorbed into the corners and recesses, and memories came at me, whispering in the turn from one room into another, and on the creak of the stairs.

You’d lived there for almost half a century, becoming a grandad, a widow, and a great grandad. You’d grown deaf and hunched and slow and shaky, and in the final fragile years the house seemed to close in around you.

Moth-eaten clothes, kitchenware thick with greasy dust, rusty tins of food, old fashioned ornaments; most of the contents were destined for charity or the tip so it felt important to see, touch, and take mental note of these items. Going through it all in the peace and quiet, without having to rush, it didn’t feel like you were gone. 

The drawers were stiff and cupboards fusty, and inside these were boxes and biscuit tins – like Russian dolls of storage – jammed full of faded photos, letters, knickknacks, random parts, newspapers and magazines.

It was in an old shoe box that I came across a newspaper clipping. It was an advert, the kind you might see in the classifieds, and it had been neatly cut out from the page. In the quiet of the room it seemed that I heard the smooth and breezy declaration of the advertising voice-over man; that deep, reassuring tone – Scientifically proven! Cure baldness – see results within 30 days.

Soon I found similar clippings, and so did my dad. In fact, they were stashed in every cupboard and drawer. Here it was; your secret obsession, your neurosis – and the extent of it was darkly comic.

But the thing is – you weren’t bald. Not by any stretch. You had a small thinning patch on the crown of your head but these clippings were from the late 80s and early 90s, when you were in your seventies. For the most part, your hair was still thick with a natural wave to it. For a man of your age, you had a fine head of hair. Dad told me once that it had an auburn tint to it when you were young. People always said you couldn’t pass a mirror without stopping to look in it. 

Still we kept finding adverts, for powders, creams, and oils. The thermo-cap! Something that looked like a space helmet with a hose coming out the top of it attached to a machine the size of a small fridge. The unique regrowth programme that really works! Free trial! There was a handbook on combating baldness, with pictures of men hanging upside down from door frames, and men massaging their scalps. Do this for five minutes daily for optimal results! There was a hair dye that marketed itself on the basis that the chemicals used in competitor products accelerate baldness – a clever piece of market differentiation. 

Here was low-end capitalism sparkling with commercial ingenuity. I pictured discredited doctors and marketing people gathered in smokey rooms, coming up with more ways to exploit men’s insecurities about losing their hair. I saw them as washed up types with health complaints. 

Anything advertised under classifieds has that taint, but maybe that’s unfair. This could easily have been a booming industry. Hair transplants were still relatively new and seemed to be the preserve of only celebrities – and even then I remember seeing tabloid stories of them going wrong.

There was the time that, with great confidence, you’d declared, ‘I’ll tell you this; there’s no such thing as a cure for baldness, and I’ll tell you why…’ you wagged a finger, as if to focus attention before coming to the point, ‘… because Sinatra would have had it by now, that’s why.’ Your voice was normally weak and husky, but in this statement you found a register of authority.

Now it all made sense.

Of course, in clearing out your house, there were no true dark secrets to be uncovered; a scandalous letter or photograph, like in a film. That had come ten years earlier when we found out you had a secret girlfriend. You were around 85. 

It was me who stumbled upon it. It was a mid week afternoon and I spotted you – or at least thought I had – on a bus on the opposite side of the city from where you lived. It was just a fleeting glance but there was no mistaking your profile, in the seats for the elderly, near the doors. It was you; your hunch, your crooked nose and your thick, wavy hair. 

As far as we knew, you only left your neighborhood once a week, and that was to visit my family every Saturday.

I mentioned it to dad with a strange blend of apprehension and certainty, like when a child tells an adult about something outlandish they’ve heard as if seeking confirmation or correction. ‘No, it couldn’t have been,’ he said confidently. ‘What would he be doing on a bus on that side of town?’ Yes, of course, I must have been mistaken. As time passed, it became easier to believe this.

Around a year later, I was flicking through the notepad we used to communicate with you because of your deafness. There I found notes from your girlfriend. It was just a few pages – pleasant, innocuous chat rendered on a page; only one side of the conversation, of course, but it said enough. 

The beautiful ebb and flow of the seasons is a great distraction. It’s like a trick; a cycle of repetition long enough to mask the fact that we’re slowly aging. The years chip away and take so much of us, but they can’t take everything – you were proof of that.