years

This time last year was a flurry of excitable activity. Buying the house, waiting to hear the offer was accepted, booking the caravan, scanning in pictures of Nanny to make the giant poster and so we could blow up a photo of her face for one of my Uncles to attach to a life-sized cardboard cut-out of the Queen.

I can still remember her face when she realised we were all there, when Zoe, pregnant with Violet and enormous with it wobbled out of The Retreat doors with the most causal 'Hallo Nan,' you ever heard. It was one of the first times I'd ever seen Nanny speechless, and in tears. We thought for sure she had tumbled us, trying to keep a secret among so many people, mee-mawing arrangements every time she stepped out of the room.

A year later and I have seen Nanny speechless and crying so many times since, but her tears have been of grief rather than suprise and love. Her Birthday Party was the last time most of us saw our kid alive. We went for a walk around the camp-site for some air and I chatted about his exams and school and, stupid inconsequential things. I didn't ask him how he was doing. I didn't hug him close. Too tall and bony and gangly and teenagery for me to do that and we are not, generally, a family give over to excessive displays. I probably talked to his parents too, I can't remember what I said to his Mum. I wish I could. I wish I could remember every conversation we ever had, crystal clear. I wish I could remember more than childhood snatches and pieces- the smell of strawberry lip-balm in her bedroom when she was still in her late teens/early twenties and I was a toddler-pretending-to-be-a-dog. Her fear of snails. Asking her, when she was pregnant, what it was like; realising her shape had changed with pregnancy; worrying about this baby, this boyfriend who would mean she wouldn't be nearby anymore all the time. I think about things - genealogy, photography-repair, cleaning, things that she was always doing or talking about and wonder about her papers and wish, wish, I'd had time to go through them with her. She brought me the family tree work she'd been doing to show me once but Bean...he always wanted me to come and play, not sit with his parents and the grown-ups.

Not a day goes by that I do not censor my thoughts to my colleagues because a casual mention of them makes the others uncomfortable. Sometimes, I catch my reflection in the mirror and I see him. I worry that my hair reminds the others of his, in colour, or hers, in the excessive amount of work it takes to defy laws of gravity. I worry I remind the others of them too much.

Next week is Nanny's 81st. I'm afraid it cannot be as joyful as we were a year before. I don't know if we, as a family, can ever have that back.