we don’t do funerals

My grannie died recently.

My life has been so littered with grief of late, it is hard to remember what it was like to hold love and not have it slip so effortlessly through your fingers. I wanted to write just to have written about her, for her, even a small amount.

I have been very fortunate in that this is the first grandparent I have lost. Not the first person I have loved and lost, but the first person that I remember crawling onto their lap to have my back tickled whilst watching the horse racing, the first person who, when sitting round a table with, I daren’t utter a word for fear of interrupting the stories I was being regaled with. I didn’t want those moments to cease existing and now they have.

I won’t ever feel her touch on my back again and I won’t ever hear her stories again. I can’t even remember the stories now, but I can remember how she would often start them; ‘when I was a little girl’.

My stories of when I was a little girl will be strewn with her.

There is never enough time and there is never enough childhood to soak up all of the love and care a grannie has for her granddaughter. I wish I could have been 6 for a little longer so I could have fit on her lap a little longer.

There is no number of minutes that will ever be enough with someone you love, especially not after you lose the ability to waste even a single second together, because they are no longer there. I know this but I still feel that well-trodden pang of not having cherished enough moments with her. I am guilty of not knowing her enough. I am guilty of not letting her know me enough. And yet, as I fall down this familiar spiral I am suddenly reminded, whether it be the blood ties or the time spent, I am her granddaughter; She doesn’t want a funeral and that is good because I don’t go to funerals. It is silly that it is in this choice I am reminded of how I am hers in some way. That we are connected. We will always be connected. It is silly that in her choice to not be celebrated or said goodbye to in the traditional way, I am seen, and I cherish her once again.

You see, we don’t do funerals. She doesn’t have them, and I don’t go to them.