I experienced my first heartbreak at the age of 15. My cat who I got at the age of 7 after my brother and I convinced my mum to finally let us have a family pet, had passed away. She was sick for some time after developing a kidney condition that was commonplace with her breed. Summer months passed and I was acutely aware of her increasingly fragile state, trying to make the most of my dwindling time with her. I was realistic enough to know that it would be my last Christmas with her that year, but my estimation of time left was still too generous. Meeting my mum after school at the train station, I knew something was off. She was snappy and piercing, and despite it being an important evening since we were making our way to an interview for a prospective 6th form, anything I said seemed to irritate her. We sat down on a cold metal bench on the platform, and I asked what was wrong. Finally, she broke, “Chloe, she passed away”. Instantly, I say she’s joking, tilting my head, face bewildered. Despite being aware of my cats condition and the very possible reality of her death, my mind still couldn’t find any truth in what my mum had told me. She holds my gaze, furrowing her brows, in a display of part relief (that she had finally told me) and part sadness. The only thing I remember from that evening is that I had never cried like that in my life. Everyone on the platform had disappeared into the darkness of the late autumn evening, and I was just a child sitting on a bench, sobbing into the arms of my mother.
My second followed not shortly after, when my Nan passed away, a month later. She died two days after Christmas, losing her battle with multiple forms of cancer. It took months, maybe even years before I could get past the sentence “my Nan died” without welling up. Viscous memories would flood back of seeing her ill, seeing the Nanny I knew hastily slip away from my grasp. She was strong, boisterous, smart, and swore like a sailor. Yet her illness had stripped all of that away from her. It had burrowed its way in and left no room for anything else, making it permanence known. In a short succession of months my evenings were filled with hospital visits and worrying texts from my mum explaining her rapid decline via regurgitated statements from various doctors. Often, after school I’d go up to the hospital, sit on her bed whilst I did my homework and keep her company. My mum would go every single day. I’d try to stay positive, “maybe this treatment will work mum” or “she seems better after this round of radio therapy”, but as time passed, I knew I was fooling myself, and things weren’t going to get better.
For a long time after her passing, I couldn’t engage with anything cancer related. If I got any hint of a cancer storyline in a show or movie, I’d turn it off, if it was a theme in a book, I would avoid it. I would mute cancer charity adverts on tv or turn away at the screen when they would recreate with actors gruelling scenes of patients in hospital undergoing treatment or crying at results. I hated even seeing the word. To this day, the disease is my biggest fear. Her death, particularly the cause of it, completely altered my worldview. I was a massive optimistic, and though I still regard myself as one, my optimism carries with it a more pronounced sense of realism then before. After all of my hoping and pleading throughout her deterioration, my insistence on adopting a positive attitude and imbuing all those around me with it, the worse thing had still happened. She died. What I was left with after all of my wishing wasn’t my Nan restored back to full health, but instead, insurmountable grief. I felt adultified, traumatised by her illness and the quickness with which it unrightfully took her life away. Years later, I’d experience mini heartbreaks along the way, and big griefs again, in all of its ruthlessness and ugliness. I remember reading (and adoring) Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn at the age of 21 and crying my way through most of the chapter on grief and how to survive after losing love. Reading through people’s experiences with the inevitability of death helped me to consolidate my feelings of grief as well as my fear of loss.
I think about a summers afternoon at my best friends house last year shortly after my cat Uno had died at the age of fourteen. His passing was a day I feared for a long time, and I almost convinced myself he would be the first cat to live forever. If not, he would at the very least break the Guiness World Records and live right into his twenties. I’d joke that maybe I’d be able to let him go when I’m 30, but even that would be too soon. I watched him grow from a kitten and he was by my side for over half of my life, he was my son. He died in my neighbours garden after going missing for 3 days. In that moment, I was the grieving child again. Tears unable to stop. When my friends mum was asking me how I was, sharing stories of pets she loved and lost along the way, she said something that has stuck with me ever since, “they make it all worth it though. It hurts, but for them, you’d do it all over again.”
As I reflect on grief, just days after my Grandad has passed away, I think about this warm sentiment. As feelings of past pain and loss flood back, compounding my current grief, I think about how it is all worth it. How I’d rather have known the love I grieve today then to have lived without it. As cliché as it is, it is better to have loved and lost, then to never have loved at all. I read somewhere that grief is love with no place to go; I like to think of it as a memory or marker of love. Proof of love’s enduring, perennial nature. That even when the embodiment of a someone’s love is no longer with us in the corporeal sense, it instead situates itself inside of us, living on through us.
I take myself for a walk on the second day, just to get my body to move. With no real destination in mind, aimlessly walking, I decide to go to One Tree Hill. It was my Grandads favourite park, and I hadn’t been there in years. Climbing up the steep steps and reaching the top, I gaze out at the view of London’s skyline before me, hot and chest heaving. I think about all the times he would have come here, by himself, with my Nan, and with my mum and her siblings as children, how he would have walked up the very footpaths I did and looked out the same as I at the view nestled between the trees. With just the sound of birds chirping and rustling, wind-battered leaves filling the air, I sit in this comfort.
I love you Grandad.
Queencoc0 Talks 
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