1972:

That’s my mum, Christine, holding on to the little bundle of joy that would turn into this large bundle of idiocy. The guy trying to work out where I came from would be Michael senior and next to him is my grandmother, Mary Jessie.

She died in 1999, my dad went in 1988 and I got the news about my mum this morning. She went into hospital last week, was diagnosed with pneumonia and died sometime over the weekend.

I spoke to her on Thursday.

That the news only reached me today says a lot about my relationship with her. With my family period. My grandmother offered the kind of unconditional love grandparents revel in right up until it became conditional on a few things. My decision to move away from my home town upset more than one apple cart. When I told my mother I’d accepted a place at university she threw a hammer at me.

Tough crowd.

But this is all stuff I came to terms with years ago. My dad had no idea who I was and if he’d lived longer I’d still be a fuck-up in his eyes. I came home from that first year at university to find my mum had destroyed all my belongings. The stuff was replaceable over time, but the writing she’d found and thrown away without a care in the world underlined that we really were from different worlds.

And all this stuff worked out. If I’d been a better son or at least the kind of son they were expecting then I’d have been miserable or at least a very different person today. That sounds horribly selfish, but in just about every other aspect of my life I try my very best to be generous. One of the good guys. That’s never stopped me from acknowledging that some things come at too high a cost.

My family never felt like one and it was the one thing I’ve never been able to fix.

My new family became the people who came with me. There are a few people who have stood by me through thick and thin and living my life online has assured that my friendships are global and the people I love know that I came to this place through conviction rather than duty. I’m fascinated by other people’s relationships with family and I guess I write about it a lot.

Sadly over the last couple of years I’ve seen too many of my friends lose family members. I know how devastating this has been for them and I feel guilty that a few tweets of mine this morning resulted in so many messages of condolence and emails/calls checking that I’m OK. Losing my family is in no way as brutal as it has been for others and while I’m not torn apart by this I am incredibly touched by how many of you have reached out in only a few hours.

Thank you.

The next week or so will be interesting. I come from a large unimmediate family and I’m the only one to escape. Black sheep doesn’t cover it and there will be a lot of recrimination heading my way over the next few weeks. Nothing I’m not prepared for.

But death makes you pause and take stock. I do tend to forget to let others know how important they are to me. So some of you have got that coming. It seems trite to drop a science fiction quote in here, so let’s be trite:

When you can’t run you crawl, and when you can’t crawl you find someone to carry you…

Finding someone to carry us is the adventure, but we often find out who those people are far too late.

I missed my mum when I was a kid. I was sorry when she got ill. First she was hit my mental illness and when we got that under control the physical stuff began to mount up. She spent the last few years confined to the downstairs of the home I grew up in. I believe I’d finally convinced her she needed to move somewhere smaller, but I visited nowhere near as often as I should. And even those infrequent visits seemed to go on too long for both of us. We didn’t have a relationship and I’m sorry about that, but going back over it I don’t think I could have done more.

I don’t believe in gods. Not the cool ones I learned about studying Classics as a kid and certainly not the vindictive old fuck whose ridiculous and damaging version of religion I was brought up in. I know she’s at peace because she’s gone and that’s enough.

I do have one vivid memory though. I was very small and we were walking hand in hand through a busy market on a Saturday morning. I got distracted by something and when I reached out to hold her hand again I was greeted with some surprise by a woman who was most definitely not my mother, but whose hand I had grabbed by mistake. Not being able to find her I immediately fell back on my basic training and wailed like a bastard until she was found. I remember the relief as if it were yesterday.

I guess that was the first time I lost her.

And we let go again somewhere along the way and it takes the cold hard fact that we’ll never see each other again remind me that that’s where the loss is this time.

Or as Bukowski, the miserable old fuck, left it:

These things, and others, in content
show life swinging on a rotten axis.

But the swing’s the thing… let’s enjoy it while we can.