CesiraAndEnrico Sat 29-Sep-18 21:16:19

She was a red head. A fiery one. Who hit her step father over the head with a frying pan when he hit my great grandmother.



She was the centre of the family, the centre of any trouble, funny, loud, distracted, impulsive and couldn't sit still if her life depended on it.



Everybody said I was her mini-me.



When I was diagnosed two years ago with ADHD and they asked if anybody in the family also had it, I had a lightbulb moment. I knew why we were so similar.



She got dementia relatively young. She faded away and was gone forever two years before she died.



At her funeral we found out she had been four months preganant with her first child when she got married at 17. The assorted aunties and uncles had a mass coughing fit. Grandad chortled. Then started crying again.



On the way home my siblings and I were listening to the radio, I'm A Believer came on, we started singing our heads off. It was a perfect moment because individually and without a word we celebrated how it epitomised what Grandad felt about her from the first moment she entered his orbit. He loved her truly, madly, deeply for his whole life.



Then we cried.



Which was worrying because my brother was crying too, behind the wheel, as we hurtled along a motorway.



The song is on my personal playlist. I belt it out when it rolls around. And tear up. I miss her. If I make half the impact she made on so many lives I'll join her in the Great Unknown satisfied. We were both factory seconds, what with the wonky neurology. But you can do a lot more than even the most "normal" person on the planet, even if you are a second.



She taught me that. Just by being.



Which is why I haven't been ashamed of my diagnosis.



I won't achieve her example, but wanting to try raises my personal standard for myself by a good few notches. The legacy she left me could never be measured in £ signs. It's beyond price. Many years after she died, when I was at one of my lowest ever ebbs, something connected us tightly again. Everything she was has been the wave I've been riding on for the last two years as I have put myself back together and felt whole and of value again.



Well fuck. Leaky face. Whose bright idea was this?



<snuffles off to go through old photos>