You’ve been snookered!

There’s a funny feeling rumbling around which resembles like when a snooker ball whacks into the triangle of balls in the opening shot. The balls scatter across the green felt and all you see is chaos (unless you’re a snooker player in which case I guess you see the beginnings of a game). I think this applies to life right now, a little bit. I suspect it started in December 2023 when the first shot was played and Dad was, er, potted. Emotional and physical disarray followed.

Beginning the process of clearing the green felt could be described as part of the grief process and one by one the balls kind of started to move in directions which maybe made a little bit more sense. (I’m really bad at snooker mind you and can barely hold the cue, the fun bit is rubbing the nib in chalk - that’s not a dirty metaphor; ball games, for me generally, bring on a frown).

Less jarring flash backs to the hospital and more dipping into photos or memories with accepting wistfulness. And as all the therapists in the whole world say, the start of managing in a way that is like the careful carrying of a clunky painful heavy bag that you know how to handle the more you handle it and less like a clunky painful heavy bag. You find a place for the bag and grow muscles that help you hold it.

But wait! 2023 is YEARS ago now! Yes I know! But these things take a long time. It’s not like going on Amazon and clicking 'purchase' and 12-hours later you get the delivery. You have to go to the emotional gym and work on those muscles so you can say jokes about your Dad being a potted snooker ball without falling apart. He didn’t like ball games either.

So getting to a point where there’s a bit more emosh-balance and fewer trembly chins is like a major milestone! Bravo, you pat yourself on the back and feel a bit stronger and a bit more capable.

But what we don’t know is that this particular snooker table is always resetting and it’s BOOM the pack is hit and it’s ball chaos over the green felt once again, a mere 18 months later. The Good Ship Family finds itself in high-seas and the balls are flipping all over the place.

And this time because we’re dealing with adult orphanising (possibly just made that word up) it’s not even ‘straight forward grief’ – everything is multiplied – the bag is heavier, more painful, needs bigger muscles to carry it - because there’s an estate which needs to be sorted as well as the bereavy-bit. And I’m afraid no amount of “well it’s a nice distraction from the loss” placates.

When you find yourself and your family in your mother in laws’ house rummaging through time via multiple dusty and crumbly cardboard boxes containing incredible documents possibly last touched in 1852, wondering what to do with barely legible diaries because the handwriting is so Victorian and loopy, finding 3000 photos of building works from 45 years ago, acknowledging that none of us have houses big enough to absorb even a fraction of the beautiful and memory-laden furniture, one feels slightly out of ones depth to say the least.

The dump. The charity shop. The boot of the car. The garage. Visited. Revisited. And will be visited again. Possibly with a white van. There is a lot to sieve through.

Do you want this (pointing to a rabbit-fur-lined-travelling cloak from 1900s)?

Will you use these when you have smart dinner parties (pointing to an impeccable set of mother-of-pearl-handled-cutlery seemingly made for children)? 

Are you likely to have a sherry party and use those tiny engraved crystal glasses? 

When was the last time you read Shakespeare? Are you planning on reading a Shakespeare play every year until your death?  We’re now in possession of least 3 separate entire collections. I suspect I would die before I even got past the first sonnet. Even the copies with pictures can’t be of help. Please don't compare me to a summers day.

Would you like 25 framed photos of varying sizes of patriarchal figures dating back to 1700- to whom you are probably related? Look at that mans insane pork-chop-side-burns.

Whose job is it to decide if it is worth keeping?

We somehow feel it ought not to have been left entirely up to us. We are still children who can't make adult decisions. 

Down to the nitty gritty, we set-to on the freezer, taking out erroneous bits of chicken, tupperware labelled with soup – parsnip, courgette, turkey from 2025, diligently put aside for a spontaneous visit from a child or grandchild, 8 bottles of elderflower cordial, some sad looking sea-bass-fillets, they would never have been promoted to a frying pan. For some reason I couldn’t part with the meatballs. They’re back in Hamsphire making friends with our frozen croissants.

Meanwhile, talking of snooker… An entire snooker table which was in my m-in-laws basement and provided hours of fun (for game-players) in the nineties has been rehomed – for someone else to whack that triangle of reds with hopefully less shattering impact.

We all need a break.

(Like what I did there?)