It is cliche to say the dead live on in us.

Flowers grow from the mulch of fallen flowers, trees die even while their cuttings flourish, and I am developing my relationship with my dead grandad.

Pruning the curling leaves of my acer tree, I think about my granddad. I think of him tending carefully to his beloved bonsai trees, and then of the tree we planted above his ashes - now I think uprooted for the concrete of a driveway.

I had just turned 18 when my granddad Graham died, suddenly and one day before his birthday. Earlier that month (the month of may. I am a late may taurus and he on the Gemini cusp), to mark my turning into adulthood he and my grandma had taken me to choose a ring; silver with a single tiny diamond alongside a larger purple sapphire, that I wear everyday on my right ring-finger. Not usually one for aesthetic choices, he had not initially intended to be there while I chose, but changed his mind and joined us. A week or so later he was dead, and that birthday outing that he hadn’t intended to attend was the last time I saw him. It has always felt fated.

In the grand scheme of losses in my life, the loss of my granddad wasn’t one I would have considered majorly formative. This isn’t to say it wasn’t important, but you must understand here that when one has already lost their mother, other losses seem conceptually less significant. People don’t care about your grandparents dying when you’re essentially in adulthood, they want to hear about the aberration of a child loosing their mother. Also when you’re 18 everything seems somehow less weighty, until you look back with hindsight and see that actually it was perhaps the heaviest time, and now you have the bad back to prove it.

Grandad Graham’s death, I think now, was possibly the loss I have found it hardest to get my head around. My mother’s death happened at such a young age that it was experienced, and now remembered, through the shaky sentience of an unformed mind. What is real memory of her and what is fabricated, misremembered, or adopted from stories I’ve been told is impossible to distinguish. Similarly my granddad Geoff’s death a year later. I grieved the death of my grannie when I was 22 as an adult, and this loss of course presented its own complexities - her house had been partly left (due to my mother being missing from the line of inheritance) to me and my sister. I felt the loss of grannie Nora, felt the probably usual pang of guilt and regret for not having replied more frequently to her hand-written letters, but her absence in my day to day life wasn’t felt deeply, as she wasn’t generally part of it. Our childhood visits to her house, punctuated by climbs up Pendle Hill (and always finished with grannie Nora waving at the bottom of her drive with tears on her face) were perhaps yearly, perhaps more frequent, I cannot remember. But as I grew, moved away, got a job and a life, grannie’s presence in my life became even less frequent, the journey to Barley too far to traverse for someone who couldn’t drive. So while her death was a sadness, it did not quite hold the same existential strangeness of my granddad Grahams’s.

I knew my granddad. In a way that I will never know my mother, in the way that we know people as adults rather than as children. He was a frequent presence in my life. I hadn’t left for uni at the time of his death and so visits to my grandparents’ in Anstey was a regular part of life. For 18 years he was in that house when I visited it, and then…he wasn’t. I still can’t quite grasp that, 10 years later. A whole decade. That’s how long it has been since he died. 10 years last month, two days after my birthday. I have tried to describe that profound feeling of utter absurdity, and mostly I have failed. When I think of my granddad there is sadness, of course, but there is also the underlying strangeness that it doesn’t seem possible that I knew him, that he existed, and now he is gone. It is a feeling that I think I have only ever experienced in breakups. One day you are together, you can touch them, speak to them, imagine a future with them in, and the next you cannot. Attempting to position yourself back into the mind/body of the person you were the day before is impossible, you just don’t fit anymore.

Recently, in our last ever session, my therapist told me that relationships continue even when the people involved no longer see each other. Everyone we have ever loved, perhaps ever known, remain with us somehow, and our relationship with them continues to shift eternally. 18 year old me didn’t want the burden of adopting one of my grandad’s bonsai trees. Even last year, when my grandma moved from their family home, I didn’t think to want any of the tools from my grandads workshop. It didn’t feel important. But now, tending to my garden outside my home painted by my own hands, my relationship to my granddad feels changed. I think of the hours I spent with him in his workshop as a child, taking electrical appliances apart to see what made them up, or filing down pieces of wood into smooth shapes, and I thank him for my love of working with my hands. I think of his tiny trees, pruned with great precision, or his greenhouse full of ripe tomatoes, and I learn something from him, a decade after his departure. Yes, I would like one or his trees, or better yet a day in my new garden with him by my side helping me understand the needs of these plants I’m trying hard not to kill, but guided by his (feigned begrudging) dedication to his trees and his vegetables he teaches me patience and commitment.

I have this year said goodbye to many plants I grew from cuttings that didn’t survive the move from Sheffield to Leicester. Wrangling a garden into bloom, I am learning, involves as much cutting as planting, and every flower planted into new earth is a gamble on whether it will root. To grow things is to work alongside death. Flowers grow from the mulch of fallen flowers, the seeds of annuals reincarnate the dying mother plant, trees die even while their cuttings flourish, and I am developing my relationship with my dead grandad. I used to think that there was no life after death, and it was in fact a dream where I spoke to grandad Graham that made me doubt that, but whether there is a place where he sits on a cloud, a paradise that is “wonderful, and gets better ever day” (his response in my dream when I asked what it was like where he is) my relationship with him is real and still developing. I myself, sharing a part in his blood, am alive and pruning my own trees. It is cliche to say the dead live on in us, so I’ll end here instead.