8.5.26,

There is a significant thing about today that I only came to realise a couple of weeks ago, and it made me happy, and it made me sad.

 

Today is Sir David Attenborough's 100th birthday; that's a lot of candles to fit on a cake. Like many British people, particularly the animal lovers, I do have a lot of love for Sir David. His book in the Little People, Big Dreams series is one which I sought out to buy for my son as opposed to one of the ones we've just kind of ended up with... It's also one of those which I have made a point of reading to my son, as opposed to some that I've left on the pile and we'll get to at some point. All this is to say that today is a day of great celebration because it is the centenary of an icon, effectively, but today is something else to me, too.

Today would have been the 100th birthday of my Grandpa, Jim. My grandpa Jim was my favourite person when I was a child. I've got a photo of a chubby little baby me sat on his knee on the Santa train, grinning my head off, probably because he was making me chuckle. We watched football together, even though I later decided I didn't like football - maybe it was because he wasn't there for me to watch it with anymore. He had a love of flat caps, old cars (or as he called them, cars), Man United, Frank Sinatra and Lancashire. He learnt German and told stories about World War 2. He served in the Navy, worked for P&G and pottered about in the garden. He had blue eyes, a cheeky smile and a soft voice, and I miss him so much.

When I was six weeks old, he went into the hospital for a second bypass surgery. He had had the first one ten years before, and the type of surgery that it was, at the time, was expected to last for about ten years, so what I was six weeks old, he needed it to be done again. My mum took me to the hospital with her and when my nana went to go and see if he was okay for visitors, Mum waited in the waiting room with me, and the next minute he was at the door, having walked down the corridor to come and see his granddaughter. I wasn't his first, I wasn't his last, but in the eleven and a bit years I shared with him on this planet I got to spend quite a bit of time with him and one thing I know is that it wasn't enough, but no amount of time ever would have been.

After he died, I wrote my first poem. It wasn't something I was asked to or told to write, but I sat and I wrote it, and we read it for him at the funeral, because it was just a kid trying to tell her grandpa how much she missed him already, and I have spent the next two decades and more missing him. I wish he had been there to see me go to college, and then to university, moving to London, graduating... coming back from London... learning to drive, meeting a man that reminds me of him in subtle little ways it took me a while to see, having my son, and later this year getting married... But especially meeting my son.

My son is named after my grandpa. It was a decision I had made myself a lot time ago, and it's a decision I'm glad my partner was okay with. I didn't want it to be his middle name or anything, but I wanted my first son to be named James so he could be Little Jim, Baby Jim, whatever nicknames, but he would share a first name with his Great Grandpa. I didn't know I was going to be raising a little blue eyed smiler who liked football and cars, but I love that he shares those things with his dad (not the blue eyes - that sort of skipped a generation) and that they're things he has in common with my grandpa. It's a different football team, but they both supported local football clubs, and by the time my son is old enough to drive he might not get a choice in the fact that cars are electric (though his dad will hopefully still have a couple of classics on the road including an old mini) but the main things, the main themes, are there. My son's already being raised on stories about how wonderful his Great Grandpa was, and that'll continue from both me and my mum, but it does mean that whilst I'm happy for Sir David, and his family, upon his 100th birthday, I'm going to spend the day feeling just a bit sad, too, because I wish Grandpa Jim was here to share it, and that he could spend today with my son. 

Why Would You Want To Keep Them,

 A few days ago the somewhat inevitable news that NaNoWriMo was going to go down was given and honestly, it's been a bit difficult to sort through the feelings that have come up in the wake of that. It's one thing to know that it exists still, but it's not what it was, but it's something else entirely to think of it being gone for good... 

I spoke to friends and we discussed that the grieving process started for a lot of us way back in 2023, for some even longer ago than that, but this has something of a finality to it. Instead of waiting for someone to steer the ship back onto course, we have to accept that it's gone and it likely will never be seen again. When I didn't take part in anything resembling NaNoWriMo in 2024 I expected that it was unlikely I would ever visit my NaNo account again, but today I decided that there was still a reason to go back, and it was better to do it sooner rather than later rather than potentially miss the chance. 

What I wanted to keep was the record of what I had written and when. I wanted to keep the records of things that I had tried, things I had written and the graphs that came with them, because there were some pretty amazing achievements in there.

Granted, I hope the memory of finishing in 5 days and smashing the Staples 'Easy' button, to make it say 'That was easy' in the middle of the cafe in a bookstore (I think it was a Waterstone's) and saying 'no, it f-ing wasn't', or the many crazy memories of the All Night Lock In, whether it was in The Big Green Bookstore or the different Scout sites we used later, or the awesome friends I made through NaNoWriMo, or that trip to San Fransisco... 

But yes, I went back to screen grab some of the good memories, and maybe it was a way for me to say goodbye and accept that it's over. Maybe. 

Over It,

I realise it's been a while and I'm sure with the multiple blogs on here about my struggles with my mental health you can guess why it's been so long, but this blog isn't about that. For those who haven't experienced one of my rants before, now might be the time to get yourself a cup of tea and settle in, because this could be a long one. 

We, as in society, seem to have become pretty good at calling out phrases like 'man up' as toxic for mental health, but there is a phrase, or a collection of them, which relate to grief and the recovery from grief which I think need to swiftly take stock of their belongings and vamoose out of the door. Granted, our understanding of grief really needs to change, too. 

A few years ago, a friend spoke to me about thinking of the loss of a relationship as much like the way we think of losing a loved one when they pass. No, not because we had both been through terrible breakups (we had) and we wished the other parties in those breakups would shuffle swiftly off this mortal coil (I'll make no comment either way) but because it's a loss of a person you were close to, or a loss of who you thought a person was, or who they would be to you. It's the loss of hopes, dreams, and delicately made plans. You can no more step back into that environment, the one where the instinct to call that person with the good, the bad and the downright hilarious doesn't need to be resisted with all of the willpower you can muster than you can call the friend or family member who is no longer with us. It is a loss of an irreplaceable person and should be acknowledged as such. 

When we're grieving though, be it for a relationship, a family member or a friend, occasionally a novel or something of that ilk, we seem to get a few days or perhaps weeks depending on the perceived significance of the loss, in which we are given some room to understand this grief and then, urgh, get over it. 

We talk about getting over it, getting around it, getting past it, dealing with it, burying it, letting the past lie and all of these other phrases that seem to rely heavily on the idea of grief as a linear structure. You start at the widest part of a cone and as time goes on it diminishes, but surely experience should tell us that isn't true. 

A few months ago, Roundtree's brought out a bag of Fruit Pastels - just the red and black ones. I grabbed them, shoved them in my cart and reached for my phone to call my nana, and my heart broke in the middle of Sainsbury's. My nana passed away whilst I was at university. It's been quite a few years, but it hit me all over again that day because she loved black fruit pastels and I love the red ones and this was the perfect sharing pack of sweets for us. She didn't eat the other colours, I prefer eating the ones which I love, but sweets are sweets and I eat them anyway. I still bought the bag of black and reds, but it took me a couple of days to convince myself to open them. 

There are things that still hit my mother and me now. It's things like not having her scone recipe written down. Her scones were incredible, and she had spent so many years perfecting the recipe, but we never asked her to write it down. There are cardigans that she knitted me, my brother, and my cousins when we were babies, long since puked on beyond repair, but even the patterns are gone - we thought we would never knit them - and the names never remembered, because I was a baby and my mother was raising one. There's some that we find in charity shops - probably the same fate that her's went to and perhaps due to another family suffering a similar loss. It's wonderful to find her in such moments, but it happens with a pang of sadness. Her loss provoked us getting rid of them, or losing the scone recipe, and that momentary triumph can be slightly eclipsed by a sense of loss that is no longer all-encompassing or everpresent, but I don't imagine will ever truly be 'dealt with'. 

I called her the day I got my A-level results to tell her I got into Heythrop, but I never got to tell her I graduated or show her a photo of me getting my degree. I couldn't share the stories of my mum having to help me dye my hair the night before because it was so many shades of - I think it was red - that it looked ridiculous, and the photos of this event would be hanging in my mum's living room for years, or the pride that, despite wearing some really incredible heels (stiletto-heeled boots from Killa Heels) I got up the stairs, across the stage and back to my seats without incident, but after the reception (and a lot of fizz) I was a bit wobbly on them, so walked barefoot down Kensington High Street when we were leaving. I didn't get to share the moment of sheer panic that they read my name before my friends name, despite her's being first alphabetically, and the slight chaos as I tried to hiss 'I'm not graduating without her' at the person reading the names (though they'd simply got us switched on the list). 

My mum recently sponsored me for her and my grandpa for the London Marathon, and when she told me she was going to, I had to give myself a minute. I get emotional about running anyway. I cried at the end of London Landmarks Half Marathon this year, and the painkillers had kicked in so it wasn't the pain in my knee. It was half relief that I had done it, and half sheer bloody pride that I had made it through a half marathon. I can only imagine how I'll feel after the full one, but it would really have been something to be able to tell them that I had done it and to show them the medal that I had been training for.

My point is, it doesn't matter the amount of time which has gone past. Moments of grief can creep in quietly alongside moments of happiness. Sometimes they are more than moments. There are times and places or activities which can bring up that emotion so acutely, and the phrases get over it, I thought you were over it or one day you will be passed it don't help. What can help, for me, is to acknowledge it, face it, give it its moment in a way, and see if it passes on its own, but if not, choose to feel it alongside the other emotions the only way I know how.