Saturday 25 Feb
February 25th 2000 was my mum’s funeral.
23 years on, my uncle is dying.
Just looking at that sentence and reading it back, the finality of it, seeing this is going to be a huge event in my life, is affecting.
I’m not a big fan of February.
Cliché time, but if you’ve experienced grief, you know losing someone is a huge part of life. It changes you forever. To have any chance of coming back from it, you have to reshape yourself and there’s that Martin Amis line, I’m paraphrasing here, that always stood me in good stead, about grief being like rain, you have to just grit your teeth, get your head down and step out into it and walk on through. 23 years after first reading that line, I still hold onto it. My head is usually down anyway, grief or no grief, as I scan the filthy streets of south London for dog muck.
We don’t know how much longer my uncle will be with us. We knew his cancer was incurable, but we had been told there would be some minimal treatment to prolong things and help him. Earlier this week however, we learned no treatment can be offered and it could be anything from a month to a year now.
In the earlier half of my life, I found my uncle very remote. Looking back, I was so used to having a dad who didn’t stop talking and constantly pulling me up on stuff, that I didn’t know how to deal with his complete opposite. My uncle was and remains a very quiet man, albeit one with a temper that as kids you never wanted to get on the wrong side of, and as an adult, one you often had to apologise for. Less than a year ago I was having to apologise to a stand-in concierge in his building after my uncle gave him what for, while wearing slippers. As we headed back up to his flat, in the lift I pulled my uncle up on wearing slippers outside of the flat on hygiene reasons. He made the point that he never wore them inside the flat, which I realised moments later wasn’t quite true.
As a kid, I was always round my cousins’ on the Angel Town Estate in Brixton and my uncle would take me home in his pale green Hillman Avenger. He rarely spoke to me on the somewhat forbidding walk to the underground garages, walking on ahead, me and my mullet trailing behind.
There was one occasion outside Brixton Police Station when he threw a cigarette outside his driver’s window (I was sat in the back - never progressed to the front passenger seat) and a Police motorcyclist pulled him over. It took about thirty years before I plucked up the courage to ask him if he remembered that. He did. As he dropped me off home, I could never shut his car door properly and I could often see how frustrated he got with me and my motor-related awkwardness.
It was when my uncle and aunt moved back to Stockwell in south London from neigbouring Brixton though in the early 90s that my relationship with him really began. As the ‘creative’ in the family, which essentially meant it was clear I wouldn’t be holding down any job for too long, I was the one that usually had to step in to handle any admin for the Spanish-speaking adults in the family, and I had to help my uncle with some paperwork at various housing offices in the winter of ’93. Our relationship began to change.
In the mid-90s, his health became an issue and again, increasingly familiar with the P45, I was seconded to be at his side and handle translation duties between him and the various doctors. Our strong friendship was arguably forged in those NHS hospital waiting rooms.
He’s a good man and I hope of course that he’s with us for the optimistic end of the doctor’s outlook. He’s not the most demonstrative of guys, unlike my dad, but he has an astute mind and a good heart and my life has been immeasurably better for having him. Him and my aunt have done so much for me since I lost my parents, and while I think his life would’ve been easier had he learned more than 57 words of English in his 58 years here, I’m grateful for everything he’s done for me. I hope there’s time to tell him that.
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