Beauforts

My grandfather passed away yesterday. 

He'd been unwell for a while, battling dementia, pneumonia and fluid in the brain, so it was a far cry from unexpected. That said, it's hit me harder than I expected, clenched its fist around my heart and sat heavy and unpleasantly in me. That's probably not all that uncommon given the circumstances. I'm twenty-three years old and have just lost my second grandparent in two years. Just lost the only grandfather I've ever known.

It's a weird thing to think about. To adjust to the loss of a loved one is to ultimately grapple with grief. To try and align in your head what parts of your life - and your family's life - have changed when an integral piece of it has been removed. Grandad was ill for a long time, and, in many ways, we lost him when we lost my grandmother. His rapid decline into dementia presented that for us. He went from having mostly good days to mostly bad ones, and by the end of it all he'd barely eat or drink, and barely a grip on the present. Like his anchor to time had come loose and he'd frequently end up in the crash of war or the ebb of courting my grandmother. The fast-paced hum of his days as an auctioneer. 

I hadn't seen him since Christmas, where I watched him fumble with a prawn my dad had brought him and then, when we were alone, listened as he told me with a certainty I hadn't heard in him in a long time, that he wanted to die. That he was beyond ready. 

I don't mean this post to eulogise or to soliloquy as such, more I'm just trying to arrange my own thoughts, comfort myself in a text box and the ticking nerve centre of the internet. Maybe that's a weird thing to do. I just know that it feels right just now, to try and capture parts of my grandfather in his last moments so that I can be rid of the skeletal, frail man I knew over the last year and remember the more vibrant one. The one with the quick grin and sly humour, who could talk for hours on end about aeroplanes and who had the sharp tongue of a man who survived wartime and divorce and remarriage and the loss of three brothers. Who married my grandmother and adopted my father and my sister and brother and I along with it. I want to remember his kindness most of all, I guess, and the steadiness of him. The reliability of him. I want to remember my grandad.  

That's all.  

A Turns 15

My little brother, A, turned 15 over the weekend.

I got to co-chaperon a party for his friends alongside my Dad which is always pretty hilarious. Fifteen isn't exactly a forgiving age, one that shows itself in the stretch of gangly limbs and the new canvas of oily, pimply skin. The joke of small jaws and mouths crowded with metal braced teeth. That said, they were a nice bunch of kids. Bright smiled and polite and good friends to A, which always scores bonus points in the tallyboard of  Overett family life.

Poor A's had a rough hand, the only boy and the youngest of the three of us, and by quite a bit too - he's eight years my junior, ten younger than M. Even though my cousin's been off making babies of late, A's still such a kid to my extended family - someone who needs care and a specific type of teasing, not the balls on the line mockery we normally engage with each other. That's changing though, and he's started to bait us all a little too keenly, a smart grin on his speckly face.

A's had the mixed blessing of my sister and I both having moved out of home by the time he hit thirteen, and sometimes I wonder what that's like. Not having the arguable blessing of being an only child, but having sisters who didn't so much live in your pocket as they paraded in and out of your life. It doesn't help that M and I are chaotic personalities at best - loud and big and total time sucks. It's not like what we had growing up though. With us only two years apart, my life was defined by my sister, just like it became defined by A when he was born too. Which is an interesting concept of itself. I was seven when he was born and have a clear, stark memory of it - of Mum on the couch, flushed pink and grinning and then of her after, drained of colour, and I remember thinking she must have leaked it all out into this tiny, red thing that had come out of her. He was so squished up and even though my hands were only small, I could hold his whole body in the space between my sweaty palm and fleshy elbow.

He grows basically an inch a day at the moment, having recently broken the 6' line, and it always surprises me when I come around to see him and he towers over me. Somewhere in the back of my head he's still barely at my hip, tugging on my pant leg to play house or cops and robbers with him. It's weird like that - being a big sister though. So much of my childhood and teen years were teaching him things - how to play Monopoly and Jenga, bake, how to clean the lizard tank. It's all swings and roundabouts I guess though, and I'm excited to see what the next few years are going to unleash - what man's going to climb out of my brother's broadening chest. Excited to see what, exactly, this kid's going to teach me.