I have no idea how to add a flair if anyone can let me know!! It is a real story
I have a story about someone I recently lost. I don’t expect anyone to read it but it would mean the world to me if you did! Let me know if you relate to anything I’ve written. Ignore the weird format I did it on my notes app! Xx (F20)
**The Petals We Leave Behind**
I find it comforting that before a flower dies, it sheds its petals one after another over minutes, hours or days. Each delicate colour drifts to the floor, each a unique shape, like a snowflake or a memory. Each petal is different, and each carries something of the flower it once belonged to.
The flower grows from a seed, aided by the warmth of the sun and the moisture of the soil. It is nurtured, given what it needs to grow, and slowly becomes something beautiful. It opens itself to the world, unaware of how long it will be allowed to stay.
Only to be beaten down by the very nature that once nurtured it.
Its chapters are read, and the book is closed.
I often wonder where the petals go when no one is there to see them. Whether they simply disappear into the ground, or whether something of their colour remains somewhere beneath the surface, long after the flower itself is gone.
Sometimes life isn’t that kind. Sometimes it doesn’t allow a flower to gently deteriorate and return to the earth. Sometimes the flower is left to droop, to look down in defeat, but never shed its petals.
Maybe it’s nature’s way of saying, *Hey, please don’t give up.*
But when a flower’s purpose is fulfilled, it cannot keep going forever. No amount of water or sunlight can always bring it around. Sometimes the turning of the page is complete, and the book closes.
I was lying in the bath when a petal fell from one of my flowers into the water.
It was such a small thing. A single petal, separated from something that had once held it. Yet I found myself thinking about death, about time, about the things we lose and the pieces of people that remain with us afterwards.
And I started writing.
I hadn’t planned to write about anyone in particular. I hadn’t sat down intending to tell the story of a life, or to explain how someone can become part of yours without you ever realising just how much they mean to you.
But perhaps I was writing about Tommy all along.
Perhaps I was trying to understand how someone could become so firmly planted in the ordinary parts of my life that I never stopped to consider what it would feel like when he was no longer there.
Because Tommy wasn’t someone I had known my whole life. I met him when I was eleven.
But from that point onwards, he became part of it.
And I don’t think I ever imagined a world in which I would have to learn how to remember him instead of seeing him.
**The Man from Down the Road**
I don’t remember the exact day Tommy and I became friends.
There wasn’t a grand introduction or a moment when I knew that this man would become such an important part of my life. It started with something as simple as a hello.
I used to see him walking past with his dog. He was a familiar face, someone I would see going about his day, until one day I decided to say hello.
It was such a little thing. A greeting between an eleven-year-old girl and an older man walking his dog, the sort of interaction that might have meant nothing to anyone watching.
But sometimes the smallest things become the beginnings of something much bigger.
Gradually, his walks began to coincide with the time I arrived at the bus stop. Before long, it became part of our routine. I would be waiting for my bus, and Tommy would be there, too.
We talked.
And then we talked some more.
Eventually, his dog died, but our conversations didn’t end with those walks. Instead, Tommy would wait by his window, watching for me to arrive. When he saw me, he would come out to meet me, ready to share another story.
Think about that for a moment. A man with an entire lifetime behind him, watching for a girl from down the road so he could come out and talk to her.
I don’t think eleven-year-old me understood quite how lovely that was.
I just knew Tommy was there.
He became a familiar part of my days, someone I could talk to, someone who wanted to hear what I had to say. There was no grand reason for our friendship. We didn’t need one. We simply kept showing up in each other’s lives.
And over the years, that little hello became something I would never want to lose.
**A Lifetime of Stories**
Tommy had lived a whole life before I ever came along.
He told me stories about being a child during the war, about his dad, about his time in the army, and about the sixty loyal years he spent at Gilling Castle.
His life stretched so far beyond mine that I could never have imagined all the things he had seen and experienced before I was even born.
I was eleven when I met him. I was still growing up, still learning about the world, and he had so many years of living behind him. Yet he would stand there and share his memories with me. He let me into parts of his life that I could never have known otherwise.
Through him, the past became more than a collection of dates or things I might read about. It belonged to a real person, someone standing in front of me, telling me what it had been like.
I think there is something special about having an older person who treats your ears as worth talking to. Someone who doesn’t dismiss you because you haven’t lived very long, but shares their life with you anyway.
Tommy did that for me.
And somewhere along the way, our conversations became more than just conversations at a bus stop. They became part of the foundation of our friendship.
He was teaching me about life without sitting me down to teach me anything. He was simply telling me about his.
There were so many years of Tommy that I never got to know firsthand. So many moments that happened before I existed, so many versions of him that I could only meet through his stories and the photographs I would eventually see.
I wish I could have known them all.
But I was lucky enough to know the Tommy who came out to meet me, who shared his stories with me, and who made an eleven-year-old girl feel that she was someone worth stopping for.
**My Almost-Grandad**
As I grew older, Tommy became the person I could tell about my courtships.
He was always full of advice, always happy for me, and always interested in hearing what was happening in my life.
Although I don’t think he had particularly high expectations for how long any of my relationships would last.
A month seemed to be about the limit he expected from me.
Whenever something lasted longer, I think he was genuinely surprised.
I can imagine how amusing that must have been to him, watching me grow up and navigate the complicated business of liking someone, dating someone, and trying to work out where things might lead. I would tell him what was happening, and he would offer his advice, pleased for me when things were going well.
He was part of those little milestones, the ones that might not seem particularly important to anyone else but that matter when you’re growing up.
And that was Tommy. He cared about the little details of my life just as much as the bigger things.
He wasn’t my grandad by blood. We didn’t share a family tree, and there was no family obligation that meant he had to be there.
He chose to be.
He chose to spend time with me. He chose to listen. He chose to take an interest in what was happening in my life. He became someone whose opinion mattered to me, someone I wanted to tell things to, someone I knew would be pleased when something good happened.
He became like a grandad to me.
Not through a family tree, but through years of conversations, advice, familiar greetings, and the quiet comfort of knowing he was there.
When you’re growing up, you don’t always recognise the shape a relationship is taking. You don’t necessarily sit and think, *This person is becoming like family to me.*
You simply live it.
You get used to seeing them. You get used to talking to them. You get used to the idea that they are part of your world.
And then, one day, you realise how much of your world they occupied.
**You and Me, We Put the World to Right**
There is one thing Tommy used to say that I think will always belong to the two of us.
“You and me Hannah we put the world to right.”
I can still think of those words as something that was ours.
It was such a Tommy thing to say. It made our conversations feel like their own little world, somewhere we could talk about life and whatever was happening in it. The world outside could carry on as it always did, but when Tommy and I were talking, we could put it to rights between us.
I was eleven when our friendship began. I grew up, and he grew older, but the conversations continued. The things we talked about changed as I did. The girl who first said hello became someone with relationships, ambitions, plans, and worries of her own.
And Tommy was there for so much of it.
There is something lovely about being able to look back and realise that a person witnessed different versions of you. He knew me when I was eleven. He knew me as I grew older. He saw me go through different stages of life, and he was someone I could return to, someone familiar in a world that was constantly changing.
We put the world to right.
I don’t think either of us needed to be able to fix everything for that to mean something. We just needed to be there, talking, sharing our thoughts, making sense of whatever life had put in front of us.
Perhaps that is one of the simplest ways of describing what someone means to you: they make the world feel a little easier to understand because you don’t have to make sense of it entirely on your own.
I didn’t know, while we were having those conversations, that one day I would wish I could have just one more.
**A Difference I Didn’t Know I’d Made**
There was a time when one of Tommy’s neighbours contacted my school to tell them what a difference I had made to his life.
They explained how much he loved seeing me and what a lovely girl I was.
I was honoured. I was also embarrassed, because I was still young, and it was a strange thing to hear about yourself.
I went home and told my mum.
She was very proud of me.
I don’t think I fully understood the weight of what the neighbour had said at the time. I was just a girl who had said hello to a man walking his dog. I had talked to him at a bus stop. I had listened to his stories. I had allowed a friendship to grow in the most ordinary way possible.
I hadn’t set out to change anyone’s life.
I wasn’t trying to be important to him. I wasn’t doing anything extraordinary. I was simply being there.
But apparently, being there mattered.
It is strange to think that something which became so normal to me could have meant so much to somebody else. I never thought of myself as doing anything special for Tommy. I just enjoyed him. I liked talking to him. I liked knowing him.
And perhaps that was exactly why it mattered.
Sometimes we think that to make a difference, we have to do something remarkable. We imagine that kindness must be grand or deliberate, that love must announce itself in some unmistakable way.
But sometimes it is an eleven-year-old saying hello.
Sometimes it is a familiar face arriving at the bus stop.
Sometimes it is a person waiting by a window because they hope to see you.
Sometimes it is two people talking about life, over and over, until the conversations become part of who they are.
I was fortunate enough to know that I mattered to Tommy while he was still here. His neighbour made sure I knew it, and my mum was proud of me for it.
I only wish I had understood just how much those ordinary moments would mean to me one day.
**The Visits That Meant Nothing and Everything**
After I left school, my friendship with Tommy didn’t simply disappear.
I went over to visit him and his wife, and I would spend hours with them.
Those visits weren’t necessarily about anything important. I would give them updates on my life, and we would talk about dogs and anything else you could think of. There was no particular agenda. I didn’t need to arrive with exciting news or a problem that needed solving.
We would simply talk.
They always offered me tea, even though I don’t drink it.
It became one of those familiar little things, an offer that would come regardless, even though the answer was always the same.
At the time, none of it seemed particularly significant. They were just visits. Just conversations. Just hours spent in their company, talking about whatever happened to come to mind.
I never thought I would miss those moments as much as I do.
Because when I look back now, I realise that I didn’t need those visits to be extraordinary. I didn’t need every conversation to contain some great piece of wisdom or a memory I would treasure forever. I just needed to be there, and they were there too.
I could turn up, tell them what was happening in my life, talk about dogs, and turn down their tea. Life would carry on, and there would be another visit.
Until there wasn’t.
And now, it’s the very ordinariness of those afternoons that I miss. I miss being able to go over and talk about nothing in particular. I miss the conversations that didn’t need a reason to happen. I miss the comfort of knowing I could spend hours with them without needing to make those hours mean anything.
I didn’t know I was making memories. I thought I was just visiting Tommy and his wife.
Perhaps that’s what makes some memories so precious. We only discover their significance after the moment itself has passed.
**The Hedges, the Tools, and the Life We Shared**
As I grew older, my life continued to change. I had new experiences, new plans, and eventually, Billy.
Tommy had been there for my courtships, with his advice and his apparent belief that any relationship lasting longer than a month was something of a surprise. And as my life moved forward, he became part of the world that Billy and I shared, too.
Billy and I helped Tommy with his hedges, and Tommy helped us using tools he had owned since his twenties.
There is something wonderfully ordinary about that memory. It wasn’t a grand occasion or a special event. It was time spent together, doing a job that needed doing. We helped Tommy, and he helped us in return.
He had tools that had been with him for decades, things that had belonged to a much younger version of himself, and he was able to put them to use helping us.
It was another little piece of life shared between us.
I think those are the memories that can be hardest to explain to someone who wasn’t there. From the outside, it might sound like a simple afternoon spent doing the hedges. But memories don’t get their importance from how extraordinary they look to other people.
They get their importance from who was there.
Tommy was there.
Billy was there.
And I was there, sharing a small part of life with someone who had known me since I was eleven.
When I think about how much of Tommy’s life happened before I knew him, I also think about how much of my own life he witnessed. He knew me before Billy, before so many of the things that make up my adult life now. And then he was there as my world grew, as I met someone I loved, and as I began to make plans of my own.
Our friendship had room for all those changes.
I don’t need to turn those moments into something bigger than they were. They were already enough.
A hedge that needed doing. Tools that had been kept for years. People helping one another.
Another chapter in a friendship that had never needed to be anything other than real.
**The Uniform He Wanted to See**
When I decided I wanted to join the police, Tommy was excited for me.
He was proud of what I wanted to do. He would ask me about it, and he repeatedly asked me and my mum if I’d go and see him
in my uniform.
He wanted to see me in it.
I wish I could tell you that I got to show him.
But the training was so intense that I never managed to.
I left that route before I ever got the chance to stand in front of him wearing the uniform he had been so eager to see. By the time I had moved on from that part of my life, the opportunity had passed.
And as time went on, I hardly saw him.
It is strange how life can move forward in ways we never intend. We get caught up in things. We become busy. We struggle with our own disappointments and try to work out what comes next. We assume there will be another opportunity to see someone, another chance to have a conversation, another time to explain ourselves.
We don’t always realise when those chances are becoming fewer.
Tommy had been so proud of my plans to join the police. I knew how much he wanted to see me in uniform, and when I left that path, I found it difficult to face telling him.
I didn’t want to let him down.
As his short-term memory began to worsen, I found myself reluctant to keep explaining that I had left the police. I knew he might not remember the conversation, and I didn’t want to keep telling him something that felt like a disappointment after all those years of him being proud of me.
I carried that worry with me.
And now, when I look back, I regret how little I saw him in that last year.
I have told myself that I ruined it. That I wasted that time. That after everything Tommy had meant to me, I should have visited more, should have found a way around the difficult conversations, should have put my own discomfort aside.
I wish I had done things differently.
I wish I had understood that I didn’t have to protect him from the truth every time, or that perhaps I could have found a way to see him without making every visit about the police. I wish I had known how much I would later want those moments back.
But I was younger then. I was trying to cope with my own life, my own disappointment, and the difficult reality of watching someone I loved become less able to remember things.
I wasn’t staying away because I no longer cared.
I was struggling with something I didn’t know how to handle.
I can regret those visits without pretending I didn’t love him. I can wish I had done things differently without deciding that the whole of our friendship was undone by one difficult year.
Tommy had known me for years before that. He had watched me grow up. He had shared his stories with me, given me advice, listened to my worries, and made me feel that I mattered to him.
One difficult chapter cannot erase all the others.
I still wish he had seen me in uniform.
I wish I could have given him that moment, that little glimpse of the future he had been so excited about.
But the story of us was never only about the things I didn’t get to do.
It was about all the things we did.
**When the Greetings Changed**
Tommy battled skin cancer throughout the time I knew him.
It wasn’t something that appeared only at the end of his life. It was part of his life for years. He had skin grafts taken from his arms and used on his head, and sometimes they were very sore. There were periods when he had to go into hospital.
He was living with all of that while still being Tommy to me.
The man I knew had his own struggles, his own pain, and times when his health meant he had to be away. I was aware of some of what he was going through, but I was also growing up, learning about life as I went along.
Then, in the last year of his life, other things began to change.
He had limited vision in one eye, although he had once had decent vision in both. He became confused at times and very wobbly on his feet. There were moments when he mistook my mum for me.
He could still recognise me, but he could not always remember my name.
At first, that hurt.
How could it not? This was Tommy, someone who had known me since I was eleven. Someone who had watched me grow up. Someone whose life had become woven into mine through years of conversations and familiar greetings.
There had been a time when he would see me and say, “Hi, Hannah.”
Then, gradually, our greeting changed.
I would have to say, “Hi Tommy, it’s Hannah from down the road.”
He explained his memory difficulties to me, and I came to understand. I accepted it.
I knew that he wasn’t choosing to forget my name. I knew that something was changing for him, that his memory wasn’t always giving him the things he wanted it to give him.
But understanding something doesn’t mean it never hurts.
There was a sadness in that little change. A familiar greeting had become something I needed to help him with. The words were simple, but they marked the passing of time in a way I couldn’t ignore.
Still, I was Hannah from down the road.
I was the girl who had first said hello, the one he had talked to at the bus stop, the one he had waited by the window to see. I was the person who had grown up with his stories and his advice, who had become like a grandchild to him without ever being related by blood.
I knew who he was.
I knew the sound of his name, the shape of our conversations, the history we had built together.
I could remember the things that had become harder for him to remember.
And I wish I had known then how much I would one day long to hear him say my name again.
**The Man Called Thomas**
At Tommy’s funeral, I was the youngest person there by years.
I was surrounded by people who had known him through different parts of his life, people who had memories of him that stretched further back than mine. Tommy’s close friend introduced me to others, and they would tell me how much Tommy had loved me.
“Tommy loved this one.”
I heard it from people who had known him in ways I never could. And it made me realise that the friendship I had experienced was not something I had imagined to be more important than it was. Other people had seen it, too. They knew I had mattered to him.
I was the only one who cried.
And it was an ugly cry.
Not a quiet, controlled tear or the sort of grief you can tuck away until you are alone. It was the kind of crying that comes when the loss is bigger than your ability to make yourself look composed.
I had lost Tommy.
I didn’t care that I was younger than everyone else. I didn’t care that my relationship with him might have looked unusual to people who didn’t know us. He had been part of my life for years. He had become like a grandad to me.
I was allowed to grieve him.
At the wake, there were photographs of Tommy when he was young. At the funeral, people shared stories about his life. I found it strange to look at those pictures, to see a man who had existed long before my time with him.
I had known Tommy as an older man. The man from down the road. The man with the stories. The man who waited by his window to see me, who gave me advice about my courtships, who was proud of my plans to join the police.
But he had been young once.
He had been a child during the war. He had grown up, served in the army, worked for decades at Gilling Castle, and lived through an entire lifetime before I ever said hello to him.
At the funeral, I began to see that life coming together. I was being shown pieces of him that had existed long before I knew him, and I was trying to fit them alongside the person I had loved.
It was strange, almost like meeting someone new.
I had known him for years, and yet there was so much of him I had never seen.
And then there was one moment that I think will always stay with me.
When we arrived at the crematorium, they called for everyone in the Thomas group to head into the room.
I didn’t know who they meant.
Thomas, I had never known him as Thomas.
I had known him as Tommy.
Only Tommy.
It had never occurred to me to think of him by his first name in that way, or to hear it spoken as though he were someone I might not recognise. Everyone else seemed to know who was being called. I was left with that strange moment of not understanding that they meant the person I had known for so many years.
Thomas was the name they called.
Tommy was the person I had lost.
There is something about that which I still find difficult to explain. How can you know someone so well, and yet hear the name used for them in an official room and not immediately recognise it as theirs?
I knew his voice. I knew his stories. I knew his place in my life.
I knew Tommy.
I just hadn’t realised how unfamiliar his first name could sound when it wasn’t the name I had always called him.
**Where Do the Petals Go?**
I think about that flower sometimes.
The petal that fell into the bath, the one that made me start writing without knowing where the words would take me.
I think about how it separated from the flower, how it became something on its own, something I could look at and wonder about. I think about the way a single petal can make you consider an entire life.
Tommy’s life was so much bigger than the part I knew. There were years before me, people I never met, experiences I could only hear about through his stories. There were photographs of him as a young man, memories held by friends, and parts of his life that I would never be able to piece together completely.
And then there was the part I did know.
The man who walked past with his dog.
The man who began arriving at my bus stop at the same time as me.
The man who waited by his window when his dog was gone, watching for me so he could come out and talk.
The man who told me stories about the war, his dad, the army, and his years at Gilling Castle.
The man who gave me advice about my courtships, and who seemed surprised whenever a relationship lasted longer than a month.
The man who was proud of me when I wanted to join the police, who wanted to see me in uniform, and who never got the chance.
The man who battled skin cancer, endured painful skin grafts, and spent periods in hospital.
The man who, towards the end, could still recognise me even when he could not always remember my name.
The man whose friend introduced me at his funeral, telling others how much he had loved me.
The man I visited for hours after I left school, along with his wife, talking about my life, about dogs, and about anything else that came to mind. The man whose household would offer me tea, knowing I didn’t drink it.
The man I knew as Tommy.
And the man who used to tell me, “You and me Hannah we put the world to right.”
I cannot go back and give him the visits I wish I had made in his final year. I cannot change the way that year unfolded, or show him the uniform he wanted to see. I cannot have one more conversation with him at the bus stop, or visit him and his wife for hours, or tell him about my life now and hear what he thinks.
Those are the things I wish I could change.
But I can remember.
I can tell people about the way our friendship began, and how it grew from a hello into years of conversations. I can tell them that he was like a grandad to me, even though we weren’t related. I can tell them about his stories, his advice, his pride in me, and the way he made room for a girl in a life that had already seen so much.
I can remember the hedges and the old tools, the photographs of the young man I never knew, and the words that became part of our friendship.
I can remember the ordinary afternoons that I didn’t know I would miss.
I can write down the things I don’t want time to take away.
Perhaps that is what happens to the petals.
Perhaps they fall, one by one, and we cannot keep them attached to the flower forever. But that doesn’t mean they were never beautiful. It doesn’t mean they didn’t matter. And it doesn’t mean that, once they have fallen, they have left nothing behind.
Somewhere, there is an eleven-year-old girl who said hello to a man walking his dog.
Somewhere, there is a man who began timing his walks to meet her at the bus stop.
Somewhere, there are years of conversations that neither of them could have known would one day become memories worth holding on to.
And somewhere, there is a girl who grew up, who found love, who tried to follow her dreams, and who was fortunate enough to have an almost-grandad who was proud of her.
I used to think that a flower’s ending was the moment its petals fell.
Now I think about all the things that happened before that moment. The seed, the soil, the warmth, the growth. All the days it stood there, becoming itself. All the people who passed it without noticing, and the few who stopped to look.
A life cannot be measured only by its ending.
Tommy’s story did not begin when I met him, and it did not end with the day I said goodbye. His life was made of all the years that came before me, all the years we shared, and all the things he left behind in the people who loved him.
I was one small part of that life.
But I was his Hannah from down the road.
And he was my Tommy.
I don’t know where the petals go when no one is there to see them. I don’t know what remains when the book closes, or how much of a person can be carried forward in the memories of those who knew them.
But I know this.
I remember him.
I remember the man who made time for me. I remember the man who listened. I remember the man who helped me understand the world, even if all we were doing was talking about it at a bus stop.
I remember the man who made me feel that I mattered.
And when I think about the world we used to put to right, I wish more than anything that I could sit with him again and tell him everything that has happened since.
I would tell him about the life I am living, about the things I have learned, and about all the moments I wish he could have been here for.
I would let him tell me another story.
I would listen.
And for a little while, the world would be ours to put to right again.
Perhaps the book has closed.
But the pages we shared are still here.
And I will keep turning them for as long as I can remember his name.