The hardest thing I have ever written

Have you any idea how many times I have revisited this page before you are about to read the words I have written here? How many times I have stared at it, willing myself to start tapping the keys on the keyboard, like the simple turning on of a tap for a flow of water. Nothing, nada, niente. Zilch, not even a drip, a drought has spread over once fertile land since June last year. If the well has dried up, from where do I drink?

Sport and writing have always been my mediums, my outlets and my expressions. This last year with Covid-19, sport has been hit hard. Hockey has basically closed for the season and the gym opens and closes with each outbreak. Writing here has always been a way of networking all the words I have going on in my mind, venturing down their pathways and creating new ones, until they are flowing, robust motorways. Sometimes it is like an underground tube system tunneled in to the dark matter of the brain to take me to places, to connect and to break out in to the light and the world above.

Words are hiding, more like hyroglyphics I need to decipher in these pyramadic caverns and tunnels, in this tube network I have many gaps to mind, because this is quite literally the hardest thing I have ever written.

So why the hell am I writing this? I didn't want to write any of this. Writing my last post (read here: It comes in waves) in June I didn't need. Obviously. 2020 was a car crash and my writing quite literally a 'write-off'. All I know is I need to provoke myself, the only way out is to go through. 

A longing for light. The room is dark, you're sweeping the walls with your hands, smearing palms and fingers probing for the light switch, not being even sure if there is one, or even if there is a lightbub attached to the circuit. Is it even a room? Maybe a corridor, with a turn left or right who knows when. Hard to tell without the light. And then it hits you out of nowhere. Paralysis. You can't move. Hands are removed from the walls, body immobile and all effort is in your feet to make steps again in any unsure direction.

My mouth is dry. Talking about it tires me, the written word feels more accomplished. At least here now, six paragraphs in, I have a drip, six droplets, though my words do not flow. This feels awkward. It is keeping me up at night, when other thoughts already do a decent enough job of that. I'm trying to let it drip long enough so the bath will fill up to lay in and relax my muscles, to give them time to recover and flex once more. You need patience too.

Hereby I drip on this page. One more paragaph. I mean, I have written tributes on here before, including for many years every 12th April. And also for well known, famous people who have passed too soon. People who merit respect and you can relate too, that have done things with their lives and could have continued doing more. Just click on any of the labels menu on 'tributes' and you will see all the posts I have dedicated. 

So how can I not tribute my own tribe? 

The day Martyn left us I still cannot describe. Never have I had a relentless, pressing weight so heavy on my chest, sometimes leaving a struggle for breath, words break under the strain as if pulverised in a mortar under the constant pressure of the pestle. It can still grind back in the most inopportune moments and I wish his smile was here to fight it off.

He smiled through so much. Born with a heart condition he has had to manage his whole life which he eventually succumbed to, he took life head-on. My little brother, with who I had a bonding unwritten psychological contract to protect without fail when we were kids, had a few lessons of his own that I learned from as we grew in to young men. How to get on with things and live life by the day despite his worry for his own little family. A father to a daughter with heavy Autism condition just seemed like an insult, but watching him cope and laugh with it at the same time has always been inspiring.

On my birthday last month, I missed getting his birthday card throught the post, it is the thought that stayed with me the whole damn day. I missed grinning as I always have when opening them, knowing it would be a stupid, wisecrack, take the piss, silly sense of humour card, just like the ones I always sent him, like I knew he would so obviously be getting his own back. That same wavelength we have always been on. The last night out when all three of us Granville brothers got together a couple of years ago, was just the biggest chortle, finishing with me and Anthony taking stupid photos with kids toys and props at Martyn's expense as he crashed out in an intoxicated slumber. The Darth vader mask and lightsabre pose still cracks me up. There was always, always, something to laugh about. I miss full-on, raucous, laughing, like having a permanent Joker smile.

Anthony is an exemplary family man, in the mold of our dad. His own family has been everything to him, his wife and two kids, and he leaves such a gaping hole for them. For me personally, for all the times as kids when as the older brother I had to scrap and stick up for him, they were returned in full as we grew, me knowing that he always had my back with unquestionable loyalty - one of his finest qualities.

I always said if I had to fight and take on the whole world with just one person, back to back, shoulder to shoulder, it would have been with him. And then there were all those pints of Guinness sunk together, ending up in some dodgy club, just laughing about it. Our Star Wars toy collections  and playing as kids; we always had a pact, all Han Solo figures were mine and all the Luke Skywalker figures were his. In those last couple of months I spent by his bedside with him, watching all the Star Wars films together for the thousandth time, and then watching him and what he had to live with for every single second of each day, seeing what Motor Neurones Disease does to someone, I learned a new definition of bravery, even though I will never understand fully.

For me, MND is the most brutal disease that exists in this world. Trapped in a body that has failed. The unimaginable, screaming frustration of not being able to move or communicate is a worst nightmare. Only second to that is Alzheimer's. Your dignity is also taken, but from your mind; your body can still move, but you are not there. The light has been turned off. It is only a matter of time before you trip and fall for good.

In a way for my mum, it is a relief, a release of air held in. Or maybe for her, not who she has left behind. At least she lived a decent amount of years. She is no longer held back from my dad and my brothers. That's the theory that holds the comfort. 

She looked years older than her actual age, unrecognisable from the staunch woman who raised us, that's Alzheimer's sucking the life out of you. Mum was a fighter, she always worked through it all, a devoted wife and mother, and along with Dad - a real family man -  she brought us up to be respectful, independent and to pull our weight in life. No other 11-year old I knew could iron, and I hated it at the time. She damn well made sure I learned how to iron my dad's shirts and trousers. You see, mum, or 'our Val' to so many, had her own way of doing things and stuck to her guns, but quite simply, she cared. 

Later in life, she had been fortunate enough to find a caring man to merit being a second husband, only to lose him like my dad to the big C. She had three now-grown boys who would make fun and joke about anything. But mum would carry through that typical Granville sense of humour and always laugh with us, often at her own expense.

I read an interview exactly two years a go with Keanu Reeves. The guy is just generally interesting to read about, but one thing stood out the most was when he talked about loss (a stillborn daughter and then subsequently his girlfriend dying in a car crash). He said: "It's about the love of the person you're grieving for, and any time you can keep company with that fire, it is warm" 

Thinking of the years gone by after my dad, I can certainly second that. But it takes time - that one precious resource that every single one of us wants more of. Time is not passing right now, exactly what we wish for, only it is by no means in the way we want it to, and I have too much of it. Everything is so raw. And none of my losses are to Covid-19, that has ripped life from so many others this last year. It's almost a piss take with the timing.

Then a quote from Haruki Murakami's book, 'Kafka on the Shore' comes to me.

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun in there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up in to the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of  sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it; it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you  won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, infact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what the storm is about."

In these last few months I have craved for those drips of inspiration every time I have come to this page, I don't know why Murakami's words have never come to me. A different water company maybe. Or perhaps I haven't paid the bill in life. Yeah, it really is hard to see in the dark. But at least I have finally written something.

You always write for a reader. On this occasion I write for me...and for my family.

Martyn Oliver Granville, 31st July 1982 - 16th May 2020

Anthony David Granville, 6th October 1975 - 26th October 2020

Valerie Grace Keates (Granville), 4th May 1946 - 23rd December 2020

and while we're here...

John David Granville, 6th January 1946 - 12 April 1997

RIP.

And then there's me. Andrew John Granville. Alive and kicking you fuckers.