NAIN

I don’t believe in eulogies because dead people can’t hear your praises. Instead, I’d rather immortalise a person’s legacy.

I’ve been so fortunate that so much of who I am has been moulded by someone who kindly shared the best and worsts parts of themselves with me so honestly, giving me the privilege to carry those with me through my own life.

I have spent countless hours with my grandmother - trawling through charity shops, sat at the helm of double decks seeing rural Wales pass by, playing board game after board game, pulling up garden weeds watching song birds go about their day and sat in the dark of her kitchen in the small hours of the night.

There was nothing exotic about visiting her small flat just down the road, but she never failed to provide an escape through her natural talent for storytelling. I am no doubt indebted to her for the career that I’m pursuing today for the way she’d ignite my imagination as a child.

I’ve been so fortunate to be audience to the myriad of memories that she shared with me from the nine decades of her time on the earth, each told so vividly.

I think it’s knowing these stories as well as I know my own hands which garnered my overwhelming respect and admiration for who she was. Her stubbornness in sticking to her principles and perseverance through both hardship and fear and inability to give a flying fuck (unfortunately I didn’t quite inherit this so well) have stuck with me through the years and continue to do so.

Her humour often arrived package in wit and a heavy dose of rebellion - one of my favourite memories being her need to have a permanent marker in tow on our walks so she could vandalise bollards (it often feels like a bit of a fever dream to recall your eighty-something grandmother encouraging petty crime). From being anti-royalist to outlandishly outspoken, she could be dubbed very much of a marmite kind of person.

However outspoken she could be, it never contained malice or prejudice. For someone who spent their childhood in the isolated ruggedness of Snowdonia before the second world war, she was incredibly open-minded - whether that be in the form of encouraging me to drop one boyfriend for another or to stick two fingers up in the face of authority.

Her stories of her childhood were my favourite, although they did not come without their fair share of sadness and hardship. Looking back it’s clear that she embodied the unforgiving and harsh nature encapsulated within the wilderness of that landscape. It resonates with me so deeply and something that I can only hope to carry with me. No matter how far away from Wales I find a home, there is something imbedded in those lakes and mountains that will always evoke that hiraeth within me.

Her strength was so prevalent that as a child I never wanted to cry in front of her and seldom did. It wasn’t because she wouldn’t have responded kindly or without love, but because it was impossible to not want to be as stoic as she was.

I’ve had the past few years to mourn for the Nain that was my best friend as the ageing mind is so ruthless, but despite how much of a relief today is it doesn’t feel any less of a loss. I remember living in fear of the day she’d die - yet her stoicism never faltered, even when it came to death. The least I can do is repay her the favour.