My family means everything to me

It was the middle of the Easter holidays when I wrote this. A period which is traditionally associated with families getting together, both to commemorate loss and also to celebrate new life.  

To try and explain how my appreciation of the value of family has developed and evolved over the passing years I’ve split this piece into the four separate decades from the 70’s right through to the present day.

Particularly during my “adult” life over the last 15 years or so, my personal family unit has been through some extraordinary changes. Through it all, my commitment to and belief in the importance of family in my life has only become stronger.

My family life in the 70’s

For me, growing up in the 1970’s in a tiny village in rural Lincolnshire, with my Mum, Dad and elder sister, having my family around was just part of normal, every day life. Sure Dad worked long hours at the Steelworks, Mum and Dad would row a fair bit, my sister was constantly teasing me, but when it came to weekends and holidays we were always together, happy enough in our own little family bubble.

My older brother Christopher, tragically died of a malignant brain tumour at just 6 years old in 1972. Completely understandably, my parents never really brought the subject up at least not with us kids at any rate, and as I was less than 18 months old at the time, sadly I had no memories whatsoever of him, just the occasional grainy picture to look at.

My Dad came from a very large family in Cleethorpes, his late Dad having had 9 kids, 3 from his first marriage, and my Dad was the second of 6 he had with my Grandma. Even as a young kid I understood just how much her family meant to her – and back then most of them including cousins and Aunties still lived in and around Clee, with my Gran being at the centre of it all. On my Mum’s side, she had only one brother, and her Mum and Dad were living down in Cornwall, so a much smaller family circle.

Ironically, it was my Grandma’s boarding school experiences that served as the inspiration for my independently minded sister getting her heart set on going away to boarding school. So when I was 9 years old, she started school 60 miles away in Bridlington. As we weren’t particularly close at that age, I can’t honestly say it affected me all that much, although the fact that my Mum and Dad got me a springer spaniel puppy to make up for the loss of my big sister was probably a help!

My family life in the 80s

Having been made redundant from the Steelworks in 1981, Dad made the brave decision to take up a job in newly independent Zimbabwe, which meant us all uprooting our lives to Africa. As by then my sister was already 2 years into boarding school she wanted to stay on, so it was Mum, Dad and me, with my sister flying out to visit in the holidays.

I still vividly remember a few months after moving there when I got home from school one day and my Dad was sitting along on the sofa on our Veranda. He simply called me over and gave me a great big bear hug, and it was only then as I felt the tears splashing on my forehead that I understood something wasn’t right. Mum told me that Grandma had died. It was the first time in my first 13 years of life that I’d been aware of losing someone in my family.

Even though I’d got so used to our regular family visits to Cleethorpes over the years, and long holidays with my Nana and Grandpa in Cornwall, now that we were on the other side of the world all that had almost become a distant memory. So though I felt sad, I really didn’t fully understand the concept of loss and grief, and somehow, being in this huge new adventure land of a world made it seemed very far removed from my young life.

Mum and Dad seemed to get on better during those couple of years in Zimbabwe, but immediately after we got back to the UK, the rows seemed to intensify and particularly the older I got, the more I could understand that neither of them were happy together. My Dad then got an even more lucrative new contract this time in Bahrain in the Gulf, and this time as I needed to complete my secondary education in the UK, Mum and I stayed behind.

As we had 2 or 3 week long holiday visits and Christmases together back in the UK although it was always hard being separated for such long periods from my dear Dad we all understood that it was really the only way that Mum and Dad could continue their relationship by living their own independent lives.

By 1985/6, my sister was back from boarding school and attending the local 6th form college, so we were back to being a 3 person household for a little while, but by the end of the decade we’d both headed off for University.

My Family life in the 1990s

So at the beginning of the decade, I was in full-on independence mode. I spent the entire 3rd year of my degree in Germany, my sister had already moved into a post student digs in Sheffield, so with Dad still in the Gulf, Mum basically had the house to herself. She was always very active in our local community as a secondary school teacher and with numerous church choirs, and so having raised us kids her philosophy was this was now the time for her to spread her wings a little bit.

After a long battle with stomach cancer, her Dad, my Granddad died in late 1991, during the year I was in Germany. As I didn’t have much budget for flights, and Mum didn’t want me to come all that way, I wasn’t able to attend the funeral, so once again I was shielded from the full impact.

Over the years, Mum and I would often talk about Dad’s health, with him always having been a heavy smoker and carrying far too much weight, it worried me that he wouldn’t be around much past his 60’s. It just never once crossed my mind that anything would happen to my Mum, she was always so active, so full of life in everything that she got stuck into.

After graduating in the summer of 1993, in a turbulent graduate employment market, initially I struggled to find a job and ended up back home in a temporary role in the run up to Christmas. By now Dad was also back in the UK, having decided to take early retirement, and sadly the old tensions between him and my Mum were back again, making living under the same roof tricky for us all.

Dad often took time out at our mobile home retreat on the coast, so this particular weekend in late November, it was just Mum and me at home. She was suffering from a fairly nasty bout of flu, so decided to sleep in the downstairs study room. She was using a portable gas heater because she preferred the direct warmth, and in order to keep the heat in, and our dog out overnight she asked me to make sure the door was shut.

Because the room didn’t have any additional ventilation, the heater burned out and the room filled with lethal carbon monoxide, which took her life as she was sleeping. Had I gone into the room at any point overnight and as much as flicked on the light switch there would have been a massive explosion. As it was I faced the most devastating of realities imaginable – the next morning I found my own mother dead. As you can appreciate its still painfully raw for me even all these years on so I’ll say no more.

After 31 years of marriage, however fragile the relationship had become, Dad was utterly devastated. The three of us passed through the next few weeks in a collective daze. The funeral arrangements were something for Dad to get on with, we had a few little days out back at Cleethorpes, but everything was numb. I remember Dad saying to me and my sister, “you kids are all I have now”, which really made us worry about his state of mind, staring into the void of a retirement he’d given little thought to, having worked solidly all his life.

Eventually I got myself back on my feet again somehow by joining up with the Princes Trust Volunteers programme back in Birmingham– a 12 week intensive course for 16-25 year olds from all kinds of backgrounds doing community projects which I felt was at least a way of honouring all the work my Mum had done for charities and her schools over the years.

I also took on a number of endurance event challenges – starting with the BT Swimathon in 1994. Shortly before I took started, Dad took me to one side and told me how proud he was of me, and that this had been the day my brother had lost his fight for life. As I said earlier, he’d never been able to talk about Chris, so it was an incredibly powerful moment for father and son. For the first time in my life I was able  to get some sense of just how immeasurably painful it must have been for Mum and Dad to lose their first born son and yet still manage to carry on with raising two little ones.

Dad eventually decided he needed to be doing things again, and decided to take up one more overseas posting to the Phillipines.

In the summer of 1995, my sister got married to her partner from University days, and Dad was there to proudly give her away. It was an extremely emotional occasion, with my Mum’s mum just about well enough to make it up from Cornwall. Just a week or so later, back in Birmingham my housemate, and by now best mate Alison started dating, little knowing that we’d end up walking down the aisle ourselves in 1998.

I went over to visit my Dad over Christmas 1995 and he told me that he had found happiness again with his housekeeper Nerissa. She had a little girl Jenny from a previous relationship, and although Nerissa was not much older than me, she was so genuine, and I knew that she would be good for him,

Back home, my sister’s husband was suffering from a very serious illness which it’s certainly not my place to go into here. Tragically he died in April 1996. My Dad’s words at the funeral summed up the whole devastating reality “Son, I can’t go through this again.”

Seeing someone so close, die long before their time, is beyond the capability of mere words. My sister was married and widowed within a year, and as a brother I was powerless to do anything other than just be there for her. Since the death of our Mum we had grown so much closer, and forged in such circumstances the bond between us was by now absolutely unbreakable.

Though my Dad had accumulated plenty of wealth in the last few years, my late Brother-in-law had always been a strong advocate of making sure that you stand on your own too feet, rather than relying on parental support etc. He was the inspiration for me pushing on to finally land a proper graduate job in the IT industry, and making sure that I made my own money to support my future. 

My beloved Nana still struggling to come to terms with the loss of her daughter late in life suffered a stroke in early 1997 and never recovered. I was proud that she lived long enough to see me get that all important job, but so sad that she never got to meet my wife to be. We got engaged in the summer of 1997, and married in August 1998, with my Dad returning to the UK permanently with his new wife and child.

Again our wedding was incredibly emotional, as my wife had lost her own father at just 9, so only having two parents actually there and the other two in spirit at such a huge family occasion made it all the more poignant.

In late 1998 another surprise, as my Dad announced that at the age of nearly 59 they were expecting a baby. All my health worries about him were realised in April 1999 when he suffered a heart attack a month before the baby was due. Mercifully he recovered, and in late May 1999, 27 years after the death of my brother, I had a new half-brother, Thomas.

Through all the hurt and losses that we had endured over the last few years finally there was a sense of new beginnings. I was so proud to be Godfather to Thomas, bringing what was in so many ways a very painful decade to an end with a sense of renewed hope for the future.

My family life 2000 – today

Alison’s Mum had been tirelessly looking after her elderly mother for many years, and she was well into her 90s when she finally succumbed to pneumonia in January 2000. Knowing and caring for someone for over 6 decades, having to watch them rapidly decline both mentally and physically in the last few years, meant that in the end there was perhaps some sense of relief in amongst all the sadness at her passing.

In the late summer of 2002, Dad was suffering with an extremely persistent cough and when he got it checked out, they found an unexplained shadow on his chest x-rays. Further tests eventually revealed the heartbreaking prognosis. He had terminal lung cancer, given his age and condition there was nothing they could do to treat it.

Given only six months to live, facing gruelling chemotherapy, he still wanted to try and protect Jenny and Thomas from his condition as much as possible. Thomas was still far too young to be aware of what was happening, I did my best to capture as many special family moments as possible on video so that he’d at least have some memories of our Dad to look back on when he was older.

The last thing he got to see was Thomas playing Joseph in the pre-school Nativity play, and just a few days before Christmas he was submitted to hospital and lost his fight. In the immediate aftermath we did everything we could to make sure they had a proper Christmas. My sister’s new partner Tim was a rock for her, as Alison was for me, and Dad’s extended family who he had chose not to tell about the cancer were also extremely supportive.

After the funeral what really hit me hardest was when my sister said to me “There are only two of us left now from our original family.” Chris, my Mum and Dad, they were all gone.

But life can never stand still, and our family life had to go on. A couple of weeks after the funeral we all helped Nerissa move into a new house to make sure that the hasty arrangements my Dad had made before he died were carried through. Nerissa decided against moving the kids back to the Phillipines because they were settled here and they could grow up in a quiet rural village like I once did.

In May 2004 I was overjoyed to hear that my sister was pregnant, and when her little girl was born in February 2005 I was the proudest Uncle you could imagine. Alison and me had been trying ourselves for years by this point, and then just when we’d resigned ourselves that it wasn’t meant to be, in May 2005 we discovered she was pregnant. From the very moment I first set eyes our little chap in February 2006 I finally understood the true meaning of being a parent.

Fast forward to the present day, Thomas is now a big strapping 9 year old footballing prodigy, Jenny is a lovely caring thoughtful teenager, both of them a real tribute to their mum.

My sister and family including her late husband’s mum are heading down on holiday with us all this week along with Alison’s mum, a.k.a super grannie, doing the work of 4 grandparents as ever. The two little cousins will no doubt keep us fully occupied.

Unconditional love, no matter what life brings. That’s what binds the generations of family together.

That’s why family means the world to me