My grandfather shot himself in a truck after driving away from my grandmother.
The newspapers said he was suffering from what they called “morning sickness”, that was their word for it in those days.
I think now they meant the weight of four children, a wife carrying another, and something in him that couldn’t hold it anymore.
He’d been a carpenter in Maidstone, stressed with work, or so the clipping said. Money wasn’t the problem. It was something else, something no one had a name for yet.
Someone found him still alive. He died shortly after.
I never met him. I didn’t meet either of my grandfathers. But their absence shaped everything: how my mother moved through the world, how she loved, how she struggled, and eventually, how I did too.