Are you there deity? It's me, Emma.

Good evening deity, I trust you are well. I hope you enjoyed the fascination we all had with your fog, and the great photo galleries it created. 

Do you like the winter? Do you even have a favourite season? I'm not a fan of winter, but there is one jumper I am looking forward to wearing. It belonged to my granddad. 

You would already know that, if you existed, because you know everything. Deities are all-seeing, all-knowing. Some of them even preside over a heaven, in which case you might be hanging out with my granddad. Not that my granddad ever "hung out", but you know what I mean right? Of course you do. 

It's been a year. I can't say it's been an easy year, and I know I've been so busy at times to stop and reflect. I know I'm lucky to have the family I do, and the friends that I have. But I still miss my granddad. We all do. And one of the hardest things I've had to get my head around as an Agnostic verging on Atheist, is the utter absolution of death. That's it. You die, you're dead. No heaven, no multiple brides, not even a purgatory. My granddad is just gone. 

So it's on days like this when I want to believe in a deity. I appeal to you, if you exist, to let my granddad know that we miss him. That we loved him very much, and he will forever be in our hearts. 

Also please tell him that setting up a Facebook account was the best thing he could have done to encourage my nana's stalking tendencies. Thanks a bunch, Terence! 

12 Months, 12 Changes

A year can make all the difference. What are 12 things that are new and different in my life from September 2014?

1. New career: a year ago, I quit TV, and started volunteering at the Sutton Women's Centre. By December 2014 I'd organised a fundraising event and I was a committee member, running the social media. In May we had our 30th Anniversary which I largely organised, and soon we'll have a 30k walk, plus a new marketing plan and our annual Christmas fundraiser that I will have contributed to. My contribution to the Women's Centre fills me with enormous pride and I look forward to seeing it continue to help and support local women for another 30 years (even though one would hope it wouldn't be needed in another 30 years...). I also started volunteering for the Tanzania Development Trust, a role that teaches me new things about the world all the time. After a brief return to TV earlier this year, I got myself a job as Marketing and PR Executive for a charity. Exactly where I wanted to be.

2. Losing my Granddad: words couldn't begin to describe the grief I felt when my granddad died. I have never seen a person die, but I am glad I was there and that he was surrounded by family. Of course the pain of his loss has diminished but I still miss him everyday. I just wish I could hear his voice again, even if it was to grumble.

3. My mum's engagement and impending move: neither of which I am impressed with.She knows this. I've spent hours talking to my counsellor about it. I don't like him, she could do much better, and Lincolnshire is even more the arse-end of nowhere than Burwell. But it's her life. I'm not saying I'm ok with it, but I accept her decision. It's taken me months to get to that.

4. Getting myself back to therapy: following the loss of my granddad, growing resentment over my mum's plans and building frustration at my life, I referred myself to counselling, marking a return after 5 years out. My weekly therapy sessions are a lifeline for my mental health and there are times when I need it and times when I don't, and times when I can't get out of there quick enough, and times when I could do with several hours not just one. I have struggled with my mental health for most of my life, but referring myself to counselling could only ever be a positive step in safeguarding it.

5. New Zealand Take 2- jumping off a suspended gondola and free falling 134m: when I went to New Zealand the first time, I made the mistake of telling the bungee jump company that I have a chronic pain condition. I didn't make that mistake when I booked it, and I was totally fine. In fact I was better than fine because it was an absolutely incredible experience and I desperately want to do it again! My second trip to New Zealand also heralded my first football match - Wellington Phoenix vs Brisbane Roar. We've got the wind, the rain and the phoenix...

6. The gym- my second home: I first went to a gym when I was 15, and my mate persuaded me to go because we both desperately wanted to be thin. I wasn't even fat to begin with but vulnerable to suggestion that I needed to lose weight, like many young women and older women, and teenagers, and even now pre-pubescent girls. And men too. I only went a few times, and mostly stuck to the treadmill. The second time I joined the gym was as a birthday present to myself in 2013 (I also had just split up with the guy I was seeing...). I joined the BBC Club and that gave me the gym at the bottom of my building for cheap. This time I explored more machines, and even weights. I went a few times a week, usually late after work, until I got the craving to playthrough Mass Effect again and I stopped going...

So it is third time lucky. A new gym opened up at the top of my road and they had a pre-opening offer. Spur of the moment, having started running and training for a 10k (running had fallen by the wayside by January 2015 because I was so upset and exhausted over my Granddad, and losing my uncle too in December) I decided to sign up. And it has changed my life. Before when exercise and dieting was a path to beauty, working out and healthy eating is now my path to strength and fitness. The way my body has changed and developed in the last 7 months is something I could never have anticipated at the beginning. I miss the gym when I'm not there. Running is my relaxation, and one more rep is always my ambition.

7. Studying again: I decided to take up a Chartered Institute of Marketing qualification through the Oxford College of Marketing. I knew I wanted to make the move, and I knew that volunteering would only get me so far.It was the right decision, though it is hard. I've done one module so far, and due to holidays and timing, I now have two modules to complete by the end of January, for assessment by the March boards. But I know I want this, and I will do it and do it well.

8. Network, network, network: Networking used to fill me with fear. I started attending the I Am Networking charity drinks in January and the first time I went, I had a panic attack and almost didn't go in. I stood in Covent Garden in floods of tears on the phone to my nana. Then I went in, talked to someone in the lift, and then kept talking to people. The awkward moment where you sidle up to some people having a conversation - just swallow your fear and get on and do it. I've now been to 7 out of 8 monthly I Am Networking drinks, and I'm going to another Charity networking event next week. It's the researcher in me - I like asking people questions and being nosey.

9. 10K: Linked to the gym (no. 6), I ran my first 10k in June, and finished in 1 hour and 12 minutes. There's nothing like the feeling of crossing that finish line, and knowing I'd raised money for Cancer Research UK made it even better. On holiday in Croatia I ran 10k in 1 hour, and I'm due to run the Oxford Half Marathon in October, this time for the Samaritans. I bloody love running.

10. Losing the person I thought was my best friend: pretty self explanatory. For reasons I don't fully comprehend, the person that I thought was my best friend was apparently lying about being my best friend for the last two and a half years. What a waste of our time. Now I know what kind of person she is, and she's not the kind of person I want in my life, and doubtless I'm not the kind of person she wants in hers. I was devastated, heart-broken. Then I was angry, betrayed. Now I am grieving, but calm. It is what it is, I don't wish her any ill-will, but a weight is off my shoulders and a breath of fresh air flows through my life. To adapt an old, much-used phrase, you don't know what you've got weighing you down til it's gone.

11. Topdeck: despite the aforementioned schism with my tent buddy, I had a fantastic time on Topdeck. Yes my last night was kind of ruined by the bull, but actually I had a nice night that night, and many other nights. In fact all the other nights, and days. The lack of sleep, the boiling heat, and the cold and damp and the flooded tents. The walking, the running, the dancing. The setting up and packing down camp, the food Gemma cooked, the food everywhere especially chimney cake and borscht and spinach dumplings. The News, the quiet time, the Wake Up song, the fight over the electricity points. The sweet relief of hostels and cabins.
The new and amazing places I've been. Venice on a gondola, Croatia to party, Budapest to steam out my pores. Krakow to hear the trumpet, and to feel the history at Auschwitz. Prague's 5 story club, Berlin's history, and Copenhagen's Little Mermaid. Hamburg gave me white wine spritzers, but Amsterdam gave me so much more. Already made a list of those to go back to. A haul of 9 new snowglobes for the collection too.

12. Me: The previous 11 points are all things that I've done, or have happened in my life. But the biggest change in the last 12 months is of course me. I've grown, and I've shrunk. I've taken steps forward, and steps backward, and then a few shuffles sideways and sometimes diagonally. I've aimed for one place and ended up another. At the end of it all, I am still me, but changed. Same same but different. I have learned so much, done so much, seen even more and all it's done is whet my appetite for life more. At the beginning of the year, it didn't seem like 2015 was going to go this way. A brief recurrence of self-harm and traits of eating disorders. But I've been there before, and I wasn't intending to get stuck there again. I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and carried on fighting. Like so many people do every damn day.

So with a new tattoo on my right foot, I step into the next school year. I'm ready. Bring it on.

Can we do it all again?

What do you do when it's all done?
What do you do when there nothing left to organise, or plan?
When they have been commemorated or celebrated and cremated and then...
What's left?
When you're not building up to the funeral of someone you love, and worrying about whether it's going to be done right. 

Then what do you focus on?

Suddenly you're back in the real world: the world you rediscover the day after they die, because the day they die the world stops.
But the world keeps on spinning as if they never left and the next day you find it's business as usual, except you have an event to organise. 

And when the date comes and goes, and the event is over, then the really real world comes back. 
And it's actually business as usual.
And suddenly business as usual seems so fruitless and pointless and you're inconsolable and inconsolably angry for no reason and you're feel like you're stuck in a dead end which wasn't signposted as a dead end so surely there's another way out.
But you can't find it. You don't find it. Things are "normal" but they're not.

You're so irreparably changed that suddenly you can't stop thinking about the next one. 
Wondering who will be next and how that event will go and how they would want it.
And whether you'll do them proud.
As if they could ever be proud of you for accurately planning and executing their funeral.
As if your choice of flowers, or words, or music, affects how they feel about you.
It doesn't: it's all for you, about them. 
It's not about doing them "justice". 
It's not about saying goodbye to them in the appropriate manner.
It's about doing whatever you need to do, to say what needs to be said or what you want to say.
It's about realising that life is short, even if it's 80 years long, and if you don't say it now it may remain forever unsaid or unheard. 
And if it is too late for them to hear, saying it anyway, to people that will hear and will listen and will understand. 
Because then you've heard it said aloud. And you know it to be true. 
And since anyone so loved is gone but not forgotten, you have still said it to them, and they have still heard. 
They hear you because they still live in you. When you breathe, laugh, smile. Cry. 

They are a part of you in a way you cannot alter.
They always will be.

I love you, tomorrow/You're only a day away

I feel I want to fold in on myself. 
Fold myself up until I'm small enough to slip into someone's pocket.
And stay there, warm and safe. In the dark, with only a crumpled receipt and some spare change to keep me company.

Unless, of course, the pocket has a hole in it.
If that is the case, I might think I'm safe and warm in the pocket, and once my eyes have adjusted to the gloom, I'll go exploring.

And that's when the floor will give way and I'll fall through it, and be trapped in the lining with no way out.
Unlike the pocket, the lining isn't comforting.
The lining is that feeling when you're in a maze, and you're actually trying to find the middle, or the way out, without cheating, but you can't and you're trapped and you start to wonder if this is where you'll be for the rest of your life. If you'll ever see the outside world again.

Like the hole that you might disappear into, when someone you love dies it leaves a hole in your life.
A rip in the fabric of space, and time.
A rip in the fabric of you.
Suddenly, you are the pocket, and the hole is where your granddad used to be. And whenever you go anywhere near it you get the sense of emptiness, of a never-ending gloom. 

Tomorrow is going to be awful. There are no two ways about it. I am going to be crying or on the verge of tears from the moment I wake up. There'll be moments throughout the day when I think that maybe the tears have dried up, and then they'll spring afresh in the wells of my eyes and come streaming down my face and it'll be all I can manage not to let out a heaving sob.

I want to fold in on myself. I want to save the memories of my granddad that are inside me and if I fold myself up and shut down from the outside world they will be safe. And warm. Protected inside. 

I don't want to lose them like we've lost him. Because now the memories I keep of him only live in my head. They are gone from his. 
He is gone.

When he was in the care home, he said, "I'm ready to die tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes."

Tomorrow came for him, and now tomorrow comes for us.

Memories Follow You Around

I thought I saw my granddad driving through Carshalton High Street today.

Of course it wasn't, and the random man was probably mildly disturbed by the woman staring at him.

This is not my first great loss, but it feels like it. Both my dad's parents have passed away, but although I liked them and had a decent relationship with them, it was nothing like the one I had with my granddad. That's why it feels like my first great loss.

But whilst I had a really big cry after losing each of my other grandparents, since my granddad passed away I haven't had a really big cry. Perhaps because I had a really big cry before. And perhaps because I cried a lot when we were there for his final moments.

I cry little and often.

I have been struggling to get to sleep since he passed away, and there are myriad of reasons for this. My mind races when I try to lie down and go to sleep because I know that if I'm thinking, I'm living.
Because there's so much I want to do with my life, and lying there, going to sleep again, I worry that I won't be able to do it all.
And as my breathing quietens and slows, it reminds me of the way his noisy, chesty breathing started slowing, and quietened. Until it stopped.


He could be harsh, and strict. He hated people crying, at least when I was younger. He was intolerant of foreigners and same sex relationships.
But he was always the granddad with the silly jokes, that my sister and I rode like a horsey when we were kids. No wonder he had two knee operations!
And boy did he make a mean Chinese. Boxing Day was never the same again after he stopped doing it.


It doesn't feel real. It doesn't feel like he's gone for good, just that he's not here. We're planning a funeral for a man that I saw die and yet he doesn't feel dead to me.

The old cliche of "he'll always be alive in our hearts" is true.
I can only be grateful that I was with him at the end, that he knew he was loved, and I will be eternally grateful for having had him as my granddad.

All Men Must Die

He is going to die soon. It could be this week, or next week, or the week after. But it is going to be soon.

It is going to be before any of us are ready, because no one can ever be ready for this.

I have never seen cancer up close before. I hope I never have to again. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't share this, that this is something to be kept private, these last moments with my grandfather. But I find it hard to talk to individuals about this. It's easier sending it into the ether. 

All men must die. But if this is dying, it is ugly and messy and distressing. 

It is not how I imagined death: a calm cold, quiet that gradually falls upon you. This is an upsetting fading. This is my grandad only being my grandad for an hour a day, and being a vacant, elderly man who mumbles and mutters and groans for the rest of it. A man who asks for a piece of the mountain in the picture on the wall, and accepts a bottle top the same colour as the mountain. 

Today I told him we love him. And he said he loves us too. 

But even men who love and are loved must die. 

Not Yet

I never knew watching someone die would be so tiring. 

Being on alert for their mutterings and mumblings, to respond to their half-crazed conversation. 

My grandad used to read my blog. Once I think he even sent the link to The Telegraph because he thought it should be published. 

I have many and more memories of my grandad. He was a lot of fun when we were kids, but he was strict too. He couldn't abide crying. But he mellowed with age, and in the past two months I've seen him cry more than I ever did the previous 25 years of my life. I'd cry too, if I was given a death sentence.

But this is my grandad now, in his final days. This elderly man who talks to people only he can see about things that aren't happening. This man who looks at me, but doesn't see me. Who tells me I'm lying about who I am, but calls out for me when he's distressed. 

This man who tries to call people on his catheter, and needs new boots to see the captain tomorrow. This man who has been husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle. This man so well loved, will be so sorely missed. 

But not yet.

It's Been A While

I haven't written in this blog for a while. A whole month in fact. Sometimes, a week won't go by that I don't have some thought I want to put down in here. But my Head Aches blog/vlog has been taking priority.

I want to explore that concept of priority. It's hard to know what are your priorities, and the difference between what they are and what they should be. Most of us feel strong obligations to one thing or another: work, family, money. My strongest obligation at the moment is family, particularly my grandparents. With my grandad now in a care home, I need to be around to go and see him, and also to take my nan to see him on occasion. My sister only gets the opportunity to see them at the weekends, and if I was working full-time I would be in the same position. 

I'm struggling with not working. The thing is I'm not not working, I'm just not in my usual environment of a full-time 9-7/8/9 job in TV. I'm having to work off my own initiative to work for my friend on her business, on a film project. I have to sit myself down and say "Right, today I need to get this done" or "Ok this afternoon I'm going to get that finished."  It's not easy, and the house can be full of distractions like the washing up or the hoovering. Often I go and sit in my local library to be free of distraction. But I am going to have to learn how to work from home.

Much as I miss working in TV, and I miss the money, I want to be volunteering like I do each week - something that working in TV would not allow. I want to be around for my grandparents, because we don't know how long my grandad has got, and my nana is now alone in her house. For a woman that does not want to make her own family, I am curiously devoted to the one I already have.

When I got home in May, I felt like I'd made the wrong decision coming home, and my plan was to get back to work and save up enough to get away and out of the country again to somewhere else by the New Year. And then my mother told me my grandad had cancer. Lots of cancer. Cancer that will kill him (though won't technically won't kill him). Terminal, aggressive, untreatable cancer. They started chemo in order to give him more time. But only a few sessions in they said it was too aggressive and chemo would make no difference.
There was no more bargaining for time. This is it. 

And so he sits in his care home, in pain, uncomfortable, but being given more care and attention than we could if he were at home. He says he's ready to die tomorrow, but tomorrow doesn't come.

But I'm not ready.

Having a family is so selfish. You create people who are bound to you by blood and more often than not care about you like no other in the world. And sometimes your kids die before you and that's tragic, no parent should have to bury their child. But why should the children have to bury the parents? Is it part of growing up? An inevitable part of the human experience - the loss of a loved one. An experience that cannot be ignored, that cannot be got around. Unless you are an orphan hermit perhaps.

And I can easily empathise with people, fictional or otherwise. Watching the beginning of season 7 of Castle I was crying even though I knew what was going to happen. But the heartbreak of Beckett's face - it cut through to my own heart.

I'm not ready for this loss. How can I possibly become ready?