Friday 11 May 2012

Dear, Grandad;

Isn't that funny? The way you can know a person, be close to a person, claim to know them as well as the creases in the palms of your hand, the blemishes on your skin. But you can never truly know a person one hundred per cent. Know their true weakness, the thing that gets them right there, where it hurts. Where you have no choice but to feel pain, and sadness, and tears come without invite. You can never know what haunts their dreams, both the good and bad kind. Can never really know what goes on inside their heads. 

One thing that I deal with on a daily basis is the loss of my Grandad. I don't think the loss really hit me until a few years ago, but he's always been at the back of my mind. Until last year, I didn't realise the enormity of loss I feel at not having my granddad here, and thats when I knew that I'd perhaps not acknowledged it until now, but the pain has been there since I was a kid, and since he left the world forever. When I was younger, I'd smell the small bottle of aftershave my Nan gave me to keep, and cry. I'd hope his spirit was around me, watching me mourn. It sounds sadistic, but I just wanted him to know that I did miss him. I used to pick those small, white fluffy feathers up from the floor, and tell myself they were his. I don't know what I imagined; my Grandad with two, large fluffy wings attached to his back, shedding precious feathers down onto his loved ones. I was just a kid who needed comfort, so I seeked it in places like that. A few years later, I said things aloud for him to hear. I remember one thing, no doubt after watching something aloong the lines of Most Haunted, and I just said loudly, 'If you're there, just give me a sign! Knock something over!' As though suddenly seeing a chair go flying through the room would make me happy. It would scare the shit out of me. And maybe he knew this.

But here I am, 21 years old, and I need that man in my life more now than ever before. There doesn't seem to be a day that I don't look at his photograph, or pay him a thought. I wish that I could turn back the hands of time, and cure his cancer. How life would be different. How different my Nan would be. And how different my life would be. I have this whole, a void if my like, in my life, and its where my Grandad should be. I need that man to be sat in the living room, one leg perched up on the stool, eyes fixated on the television. I need to see his brown hair, messy and untamed with his thick glasses, more for vision than fashion, obscuring his eyes. I need to just sit in his presence, and enjoy it. I need it to be christmas, and I need to be that child again, watching Wallace & Gromit with the man who said few words, but gave such comfort. I need my Grandad to be here, to fill this hole in my life, and to fix life. 

And yet some people don't even know that I live like this every day. That at some point, I think about him. That I cry because I wish more than anything, that I have my Grandad here in my life. I tried to tell Jack about how I felt, but it seems to come out of nowhere when you just suddenly spring something like that on a person, so now I can see why people mourn in silence. Because if you're not mourning out in the open, publicly, people just assume it comes from attention seeking and such things. People also think that because you go through a loss at such a young age you grow up and, eventually, you get over it. But you don't, it stays with you. And maybe spending so much time with my Nan brought it all back to me. That if she could miss a person in such a strong, and passionate way, day in, day out, then that person had to be incredible. But I know, the day this he took his last breath, a part of me deep down was already mourning him, and it took years for me to go down the roads of pain, and disbelief, hurt and anger to identify that somewhere inside of me, the rage and the pain that I feel sometimes is because someone was took from my life that I needed. And there is no forgiving that.