Our Peter Pan Flew Away
Without seeing us all grow up
The morning was still waking up to the new year as sunshine washed my eyes clean of midnight’s merriments. I cruised with friends of new on sails of silken smiles long after the darkness took itself to bed. We sprinkled pocketfuls of pixie dust over ourselves and joined the others floating across the sleepless world below. Up there we chose when the new day would weigh our feet back down to Earth. Now I was back to each step being held accountable by the concrete beneath them.
My internal compass set a course for home, and I began to glide my sleepy feet over the silent streets of Brighton. I could feel the stillness of this new day resting on my lap during my entire train journey back to my humdrum town, and walking beside me upon perusing the shelves at my local stationers.
To me, upholding the tradition of buying a new diary on the 1st of January was more exciting than the events preceding it. I was able to choose a vessel to carry me through the next year and a place for me to scribe away as much or as little about it as I deemed fit. Thrilled by a nest of blank pages and what my future eggs might hatch within them.
Who would I meet? What would I learn? What hardships would I overcome? Which ones would I still carry over to the next year? Thoughts whirled about me like water stirred lazily by a teaspoon in the long-anticipated cup of coffee I’d make once arriving home.
Sun now bathed on the stretch of road leading up to my house and stillness held my free hand and skipped along beside me as I walked. We stopped in front of my house and my eager right hand wrapped the door a few times. It opened and my eyes were greeted by the tear-soaked face of my sweet mother. I suddenly felt another person’s weight anchor my feet to my doorstep. Stillness embraced me in a two-armed hug from the inside.
New Year’s Days have always seeped in rumination. Where my mind can hold fragments of time steadily in both hands whilst standing on the mountain edge between yesterday and tomorrow. Regardless of where I am or what I’m doing, I apparate myself into moments of clarity and sit there for a while. There I can let go of what once was, be grateful for what now is, and make room for what might be.
For me, this ritual remains as constant as the beckoning sunrise of each New Year’s Day.
On the eve of my twenty-second one, my granddad passed away in his hospital bed.
For those who know the story, we most likely envisage Peter Pan as a spritely young boy dressed in green, with a feather in his cap and a sparkle in his eye. Filling our hearts with the spirit to soar over the spired rooftops of London and away to satiate our curiosity beyond the second star to the right.
For us, he wasn’t a boy, he was my granddad, and I was twenty-two when he decided to return to Neverland without us.
I only remember glimpses of him now. Being there as I opened presents on Christmas day. Our ritual of him carrying me into the living room wrapped in towels after bathtime and throwing my giggling mass onto the sofa. When he sang Frank Sinatra songs to me while he danced around in his trademark blue cotton dressing gown, his wide smile with side teeth missing, indicative of a life well-lived, the times he would walk ahead of me in the street then turn and point behind me, telling me there was a dog there. He’d use this sneaky deception to start scurrying away from me in a shroud of belly laughter, tempting me to chase after him.
The time came in my late teenage years when I would ask him for cigarettes, to which he sometimes obliged. He understood what it was to be addicted to smoking, as he had been since the age of thirteen. Before I began University, he boldly told me through tobacco-stained lips that I was smart enough to be anything I wanted to be in this life, whilst calling himself stupid as a basis of comparison.
He may have never flown in his lifetime but he made me believe I could.
When cancer began to devour him, my immediate family were none the wiser. He made certain to distance himself from all children and grandchildren during the entire year, during his diagnosis and first phases of treatment. By the time he granted us all an audience, it was difficult to decipher the rambunctious spirit of youth from within the dying old man we saw before us.
The last time I saw our Peter Pan, he was propped upright in a cloud, in a white hospital room filled with those whose lives he’d touched. Cancer’s anchor had him wrapped tightly in invisible chains whilst each family member and loved one offered tribute and kept him company as he slowly sank. For the weeks leading up to the fateful day when his chains were loosened and he took flight from his bed back to Neverland without us, I didn’t know it would be our last goodbye.
On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2012, he felt his light flickering. He gently told his wife and daughter who were each at his side and begged them not to tell me and my brother until we had each returned home on New Year’s Day. Thus, as stillness and I stood densely on my doorstep that morning, my mother wept as the news finally spilt from her and crashed on me like a wave.
She said it was his wish for my brother and me to start the new year in celebration and not have this one, nor ones to come, poisoned by sorrow-tipped arrows to the heart. It was then that I truly learned of his caring nature, which had always beat inside him, now set fiercely free for us to behold. In the face of all my memories of my granddad, this was by far the most life-affirming, and I just so happened to diarise it the day after he died.
My ears have since prickled with astonishing stories of the life he led before I knew him. Stories of when he was in fact a pirate who once pillaged and ravaged the lives of his enemies and struck fear into the souls of his loved ones. These may ring loud with truths but bear no light to cast a shadow over the Peter Pan I knew him to be.
I will always remember those moments I shared with the boy whose spirit never seemed to age a day. They were part of his resounding redemption story I caught glimpses of through my happy childhood eyes. I am forever grateful they were never burdened by the sight of the sparkle leaving his. Nor the moment his light finally faded out.
My mother carried it for us whilst remaining as the grandfather clock, strong and reliable. Her hands picked up the pieces of my grandmother’s broken heart and cradled them like a baby until fully healed. Her varnished frame and finishings reigned majesty upon those around her and provided something sturdy for the fallen to lean on. In the face of adversity, her arms ticked on to ensure those she cared about were still keeping on top of everything they needed to do.
Sometimes she needed to be reminded of how even the most well-oiled of mechanisms need downtime, and that she was in fact a human being and not a clock. It wasn’t hers nor anyone else’s responsibility to compensate for the one who flew away before seeing his four grandchildren grow up, and his two children grow older.
Life is as magical as it can be cruel. Of its many facets, how many moments do we have to make lasting impressions we can be remembered by?
On the day of my granddad’s funeral, I wrote him a letter, which still rests with him inside his coffin. Within it reads “You will forever be our Peter Pan. Now is your time to return to Neverland and continue your adventures. Never grow up and never forget us.”
I still like to picture my granddad and how I saw him as a child, with mischievous toes treading the spired tips of old London rooftops beneath starry nights. Sometimes flying further afield on New Year’s Eve to sprinkle pixie dust over each of us, to help us continue to uphold his final wish.
To live can be an awfully big adventure.
Are you a writer looking for your tribe? Love to read? Want full access to Medium? I’ve got you covered.
