My Hero

It is the worst thing in the world to watch your Hero cry. To know that there is something so terrible out there that the person you admire could be hurt by it.

That is why the death of my Grandad was so hard.

Losing my Grandad was hard enough. But to watch my Nan cry was worse.

My Nan never cries.

My Nan never lets anything get to her.

But that did.

For those of you reading this who don’t know, the lady in the picture above is my Nan. She is also my best friend and my hero. If I had to pick some one to be just like when I am older; it would be her.

My Nan had 5 kids who had 11 kids who now have a whole heap of kids themselves. As a result we have a pretty large family and by some miracle my Nan manages to keep track of all of them! I have no idea how she does it! She doesn’t always get our name right on the first (or second) go but she knows what’s going on with all of us (not sure if she has a secret spy network). On top of keeping on track of everyone’s lives she also tends to play a staring role in most. Spending time helping each and every one of us to get on with our lives. If she disappeared for a week I think that everything would just fall apart. It’s not necessarily that the jobs she does are hugely important but she does the little things that keep our lives ticking over.

My Nan basically is our family. At Christmas and Mothers day and New Year everyone in the family will make a special effort to go and see her and as a result we get to spend time with each other. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t see each other, we wouldn’t spend time together and we wouldn’t be a family. She has always taught us that family is important (she’s not part of the mafia I swear). She has always led by example and put her husband and her children before everything else to make sure that her family was well cared for. She still does it now even though the family is huge.

Her home is our home. All of us have spent so much time in her house now that there is no one who doesn’t feel at home there. It’s where you bonded as sibling or cousins, aunts or uncles, nieces or nephews. You go in, you sit down and Nan makes you a cup of tea and you sit and chat about whatever is on your mind with the TV going in the background. Nan will sit there and listen and add a few bits here and there but it is a place where you get to be heard without judgement. She might tell you that you have been a bit of an idiot and cocked up but when she tells you she never makes you feel like she loves you any less.

Along with the importance of family something that my Nan has always taught me is that when something goes wrong it will sort itself out again, or it wont, it doesn’t really matter. ‘Oh well. Life goes on’ is her motto of choice. As a result almost nothing ever phases her. She takes the good with the bad and just ‘takes it as it comes’ (another one of her phrases). I find this particularly helpful as I have a tendency to wind myself up about the small things and get myself in a tizzy. At those points I call my Nan and give her an update. She checks that I am okay, and then she tells me to pick myself up and try again. It’s not that she doesn’t care, it’s that she knows life is always going to be ups and downs and that you can only try your best.

I mentioned earlier that my Nan and I are best friends. As a kid she spent a lot of time taking care of me while my Mum and Dad worked but it wasn’t until the loss of my Grandad that I feel that we really bonded. My Nan is a hardcore romantic – not that she would admit it. She married once to the love of her life and that was it. She loved him in both sickness and in health. She spent much of her life looking after my Grandad, making sure he took his medicine, that he saw the doctor when he needed to and all the bits in between at home. She treated him the same whether he was dancing around the kitchen with his walking stick and a hanky on his head or whether he had been lying in bed for a week sick. Either way she loved him just the same and treated him just the same.

His death is the only time I have seen my Nan cry and that’s all I have to say about that.

Since his death my Nan and I have only gotten closer. She comes to visit me at uni with my parents and when I come home for holidays I take her out for dinner. We are like two silly trouble makers when we are together. My Nan swears at people (mainly me), and I run around shocked and laughing after her. She is so full of life and love that I think she is amazing. She will help anyone in need of anything and accepts everyone we bring home into the family. She supports all of us and makes us all stronger because she is a part of our lives. She complains that we give her too many things at Christmas etc. but the truth is we can never give as much back as we get from her.

She IS the backbone to our family providing us with everything we need to support ourselves and to be successful without ever thinking of herself. If I can grow up to be like that then I will be extremely happy.

Happy Birthday Nan