How My Uncle’s Legacy Saved His Son’s Marriage

When it comes to mental health, respect, honesty and acceptance go a long way

I walked into the church to see my cousin, Jon, sitting at the front, entrancing the crowd with his beautiful classical guitar playing.

I felt like a stranger despite being the niece of the deceased and the daughter of his favourite brother. Everyone wanted to pay their respects to the family and so I left them to be hugged by the swathes of people who had turned up to bid farewell to a man who had clearly made a massive mark on the world.

Being close family, I walked to the front to try to find some space to sit and found my dad and another cousin. They pulled my daughter and me into the tiny, crowded space and we slotted in as best we could.

The church continued to fill until all the available space was taken. Eventually, one of the funeral directors called for any close relatives to be allowed into the church and for everyone else to listen from the open doors.

The classical guitar continued to lull me into a quivering mess as I saw how many people were there to show their gratitude to my wonderful, amazing Uncle Mike. I tried to fight the tears and, for the moment, I was winning.

With so many people flowing out of the doors of the church and onto the gravel outside, it only now became apparent how loved my uncle had been, and the service that followed showed us just why he had stolen a piece of so many people’s hearts.

Both of his daughters gave eulogies, as did my dad. All three of them barely making it through a string of words at a time without their voices shaking or the tears flowing.

And then his eldest granddaughter, then seventeen, stood up to read the eulogy written by my aunt, his adoring wife.

This was the grandchild with the most privileges; the one who, as a baby, went to stay with Granny and Baba every Saturday night and had all the special attention that the others never quite had in the same quantity. The deep connection she had with them was visible to anyone who knew them.

As she read her grandmother’s words, her voice, too, wobbled and cracked under the emotions bubbling up from within. My aunt looked on, tears pouring down her face, unable to see the world beyond those words spoken by her granddaughter about her beloved Mike.

To see them all there — husbandless, fatherless, brotherless, grandfatherless — sharing those magical memories of a gentle, smiling, big-hearted, and loving man, whose smile we would never see again in the physical realm, broke me.

But what broke me more was to know what it was that he had hidden so well beneath that smile, and the trauma he had been through to remain on this earth and touch so many people’s lives.

As the service came to a close, there were two final announcements which had been requested by Mike himself.

The first was concerning the fund he had set up to support the mental health unit that he owed his life to, for the many occasions he found himself hospitalised there.

And the second was his request to close the ceremony and honour his homecoming back to spirit with the song he would always associate with the homecoming of his beloved Queens’ Park Rangers football team.

Sheets of paper printed with the lyrics of Daydream Believer were handed out and, for all I know, the sound of a massive crowd in a tiny church may have drifted right out of those open doors, across the Kensal Green Cemetery and onto the streets beyond. The sound of us, singing our hearts out in memory of a very, very loved man.

The flashbacks were coming thick and fast and all I could see in my mind’s eye were the many memories in their big London house.

There were Christmas Day celebrations from my toddlerhood to my teen years. They knew how to throw a Christmas Day party to remember.

There were the many afternoons wiled away playing pool and pinball down in the basement while listening to my cousin’s extensive vinyl collection.

There was the weekend-long party coinciding with the Notting Hill Carnival, during which the massive house was taken over by teenagers and twenty-somethings.

There were the many Saturdays when the boys and my younger cousin, Zoe, would go off to the Queen’s Park Rangers matches and the rest of the girls would wander down to Portobello market and get lost in the foods, clothes, and decorative items.

And so, so many more times….

Mike was always there, smiling, laughing and joking, and making himself useful as a host. Or generously taking everyone out for lunch, because he had done well for himself in life — and he could, so he did.

Despite everything he had been through, or perhaps because of all he had battled, he never failed to show up consistently as the big-hearted man that remains in my memory. Despite the fact that he bore the brunt of the ongoing struggles posed by our collective family’s predisposition to mental health challenges.

When I was a child, I would hear hints of Mike being unwell. I was aware that he had been hospitalised more than once and would think of my cousins, close to my sister and me in age, and wondered how they were all coping with their dad sick in hospital.

I didn’t understand what the sickness was, though. I was told it was a nervous breakdown, that it was all due to his job and that it very common in his line of work.

It sounded a little scary to me and I didn’t really understand.

Otherwise, his illness was never really spoken about until another episode resulted in a decision to take early retirement.

I was a little older by now — in my early twenties — and he was home again. He had been taking cooking lessons as a way to occupy himself with something quiet and creative and was busy preparing something in the kitchen when I arrived with my dad.

I remember how sweet he looked as he accepted the change, and did his best to embrace his new life after selling his share in the investment company where he had served for his entire career. But as he fumbled with his newfound cookery skills, he was shooed out of the kitchen by my aunt who, incredible cook that she was, couldn’t bear to let any amateur make a balls-up of lunch.

The seriousness of his illness was now common knowledge, yet still it was kept hushed and the fact that his son — my cousin, ‘A’ — also had serious mental health issues was never made known to any other members of the family until things came to a head.

A’s life was crumbling around him. His sweet, kind-hearted and down-to-earth wife had taken their children from their marital home on a remote island in The Canary Isles to protect them and herself from A’s outbursts.

Unbeknownst to her when they had met, fallen in love, fallen pregnant and got married very quickly, life would turn out unpredictable and like a rollercoaster with A.

It was when she began to feel physically threatened in their isolated home that she was finally told by A’s family the real truth of his condition — that he had been diagnosed as bipolar many years before and had a history of sudden and violent outbursts.

And that he point-blank refused to take any medication for it.

It had only recently come to the entire family’s awareness — in the couple of years before Mike’s passing — how important it is to everyone concerned to be honest, upfront, and truthful about mental health, no matter how delicate it all may appear.

When A lost his father, he was still estranged by his wife. Despite the beauty of that service, the emotional turmoil didn’t take long to erupt. The wake that followed was interrupted by a distraught man determined to blame everyone but himself for his predicament.

Weeks more followed like this but, gradually, something eventually became unstuck.

A knew how much his father had been helped by the mental health unit and the ongoing medication. He knew in his heart of hearts that the medication was what not only saved his father’s life, but had enabled them all to live a decent and happy childhood. Most importantly, it enabled them to have a father who gave them everything they could ever have wanted, most especially love and security.

Eventually, A softened and relented. He finally accepted help.

That was late 2019.

Their 2020 lockdown was spent together on the coast near to me, where A’s parents, my uncle and aunt, had bought an apartment while Mike was still alive. While many couples struggled during those months, it was the remaking of A and his wife as a unit and they returned together to their home in The Canary Isles in July of that year.

They are still doing well now and are very happy.

As for Uncle Mike, I can still picture his cheeky, warm smile, and have many happy memories to cling to. And a go-to song if I need to have a good cry over him.

I am grateful to have all these memories and I definitely have a lot to thank the staff in the mental health unit of the hospital for too!