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May. 28th, 2003
I feel strange. Numb would be a good word. Sure, I've cried a little, but I'm a 30-something year old with a mortgage, car and job with "editor" in the title so I only get to bawl like a toddler when an immediate relative dies.
I sat around the flat for a while after the unpleasant task of informing everybody was done. I poked listlessly at a few things and thought about being a small child coming to visit my grandma in London. I thought of bread and butter and the underground and fighting with my brother in the back garden and the very particular sound that the gate behind Grandma's house made when it swung open. I thought about the confused woman I saw last time I saw her about two and a half months ago.
Truth be told, I'm the closest one left to Grandma in my half of the family. Mum and her never got on too well and my brother, understandably, has never forgiven her for certain things she said to Dad before he fell ill. Neither of them have seen her since Dad's funeral. She was in her early 90s, a good innings (as the cliche goes) and was rapidly losing her mental faculties. It was probably for the best.
Her death still leaves me feeling empty though. I couldn't face going straight to work when I got into central London this afternoon. Instead, I bought comics and went and read them over a burger and fries in Ed's Easy Diner, listening to the buzz and life of Soho around me. Grandma spent most of her life in this city. I doubt she would have recognised the Soho of 2003, though. She saw London ravaged by the Blitz, saw her sons mature in the swinging 60s and watched her young grandchildren don junior flares in the 70s.
She's gone now and so's the London she knew. This is the 21st century, and I'm at the start of a new married life. It's a shame so many elements of my old life are already gone.
I sat around the flat for a while after the unpleasant task of informing everybody was done. I poked listlessly at a few things and thought about being a small child coming to visit my grandma in London. I thought of bread and butter and the underground and fighting with my brother in the back garden and the very particular sound that the gate behind Grandma's house made when it swung open. I thought about the confused woman I saw last time I saw her about two and a half months ago.
Truth be told, I'm the closest one left to Grandma in my half of the family. Mum and her never got on too well and my brother, understandably, has never forgiven her for certain things she said to Dad before he fell ill. Neither of them have seen her since Dad's funeral. She was in her early 90s, a good innings (as the cliche goes) and was rapidly losing her mental faculties. It was probably for the best.
Her death still leaves me feeling empty though. I couldn't face going straight to work when I got into central London this afternoon. Instead, I bought comics and went and read them over a burger and fries in Ed's Easy Diner, listening to the buzz and life of Soho around me. Grandma spent most of her life in this city. I doubt she would have recognised the Soho of 2003, though. She saw London ravaged by the Blitz, saw her sons mature in the swinging 60s and watched her young grandchildren don junior flares in the 70s.
She's gone now and so's the London she knew. This is the 21st century, and I'm at the start of a new married life. It's a shame so many elements of my old life are already gone.