Absence and Anniversaries

A new life in Washington D.C.

I didn’t want to be this kind of grandfather.

The kind where a child greets you with a shy turn into her mother’s skirt. The kind who only appears on birthdays and family holidays. The absent kind.

I was going to be the familiar face holding my granddaughter’s hand and taking her to school. She was going to come home with me so her mother could work without worrying when a Zoom ran late. She would find me with an instant smile and tell me about her day.

I was going to be there.

Tonight, I am on a plane flying back to D.C. after a short trip home to England. It has taken my granddaughter almost two days to remember who I am. And now I am leaving again.

The absent grandfather.

We bonded over playing on swings in the park, reading her books about hungry donkeys, frozen princesses, and friendly crocodiles, and I helped her place yellow daffodils on my wife’s memorial at the end of the garden.

On the second day, she called out to me to pick her up when she was too tired to walk. She rested her head on my shoulder and slept cushioned in my arms.

But then it was time for me to go.

Her eyes followed me over her daddy’s shoulder as they walked back to their house, and I walked towards the car. It was the same knowing look my dog, Blue, gives me every time I leave him.

Not again.

I recognize it as the look my wife would give me when our marriage was young and fragile. I was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail in London, and I had just returned after nearly three months away in Iraq and Jordan, covering the first weeks of the 1990 Gulf War.

We had a little boy, Mickey, and Michelle was struggling with what I now suspect was a mild postpartum depression, but it may have simply been that she was lonely and exhausted with raising a baby on her own.

I was spending over a third of the year abroad and, perhaps worse, I often didn’t return home until late, when I was in London.

There was always the offer of an after-work pint. Sometimes it would be two. Or three. I would make my excuses to my wife—a breaking story, a legal query, a white lie—from the public phone in the back room of The Harrow, the Mail’s pub just off Fleet Street. She must have heard the cacophony of clinking glasses and raucous laughter in the background.

While I’d been in the Middle East, a crate of champagne arrived at my house from the editor to mark five front page splashes in as many days. There was a letter congratulating me on my reporting from Baghdad.

But my wife welcomed me home with dead eyes.

She had learned to live without me. I had been gone for so long and so often that she had given up including me in her plans. How could she make any arrangements when I couldn’t even tell her when I would be there? It was easier to leave me out altogether.

I don’t know if she stopped loving me. I hope not. But I genuinely do believe our marriage would not have survived if I hadn’t changed. Even in the months before she died, she still reminded me of the difficulty of those tough, early years.

I knew she had moved on from me, and I was at least smart enough to understand it couldn’t go on. I left the Mail, moved to America, taking my family with me, and devoted the rest of my working life to being there for my family.

Until now.

I moved to Washington less than three months after my wife died in the living room of our Cotswolds house. I would never have left without the blessing of my son and my two grown-up daughters, but I think we all knew that they were thinking only of me, not themselves.

To my son, Mickey, I would be a little closer to him in California, even if I was still nearly 3,000 miles away.

My daughters now live in the UK. Savannah and her partner, Kieran, said they would take care of our husky, Blue, and her elder sister, Jazmin, reassured me that she, her husband, Bruce, and their daughter—my granddaughter—Grace would be just fine.

My justification was that little Grace would soon forget that her “Pops” had been missing for a year or so. She was still a baby, after all. I wouldn’t be gone for long.

But now it’s been 18 months, and Blue and Gracie still look at me with sad, knowing eyes when I leave. They are making new lives without me. But they know I should really be there. And I do, too.

It is Jazmin’s in-laws that Grace relies on. They are wonderful, warm people. There is Sunday lunch for all the family, and always games, hugs, and love for the grandchildren in their home in the next town. Most importantly, they are there.

I was asked recently, over dinner, if a memory stood out from the years we spent raising three children in England and the United States. I answered that I had been in New York once for work when Jazmin called from our home in Newport Beach, California, to say she had won a major dance award.

Even now, my kids give me a hard time for not being there to witness her big moment, but there’s no malice in it. Because it was the only thing I missed. I was there for all the school pick-ups, the soccer games, the Little League, the softball, the school plays, the parent-teacher conferences, the ballet classes, the dance shows, the snowboarding trips, and the surf camps.

I missed one awards show. And that was okay.

I was not an absent dad.

My own parents were not especially extraordinary. My dad was a bank manager, and my mom worked in a hospital helping patients prepare for returning home after illness, but they were always there for my brother and me, and I never doubted their love for a second. For that alone, I believe I was immensely blessed. When my dad died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 63, I remember lying in his bed that night and telling Michelle that he was a “good man.” It sounds very bland and ordinary written here, but I meant it as the very highest compliment.

Michelle’s father left when she was a baby, and he would occasionally call with a hollow promise or a guilty lie. He was never there. And she never got over it.

But now here I am spending more time listening to Donald Trump than I am with my family.

Every mindless Oval Office rant takes precious minutes from the limited time I have left on this Earth. I love my job running the D.C. Bureau of the Daily Beast, and there is no doubt about the importance of challenging an administration I believe is imperiling the world's future.

But some days are harder than others.

It’s my wedding anniversary today, and it doesn’t matter if I forget to buy a card. It would have been 35 years, but the only anniversary that counts now is my second without her.

I try to remember Michelle on her wedding day, her tight, pink dress ripped and stained as she danced on the grass in the marquee. British Airways lost her luggage on the way to the Bahamas, and she spent her entire honeymoon in a bikini. I catch myself smiling at the memory.

But then a more recent photo comes up on my iPhone. One from her final days. Algorithms can be cruel.

A year ago, soon after I met Holly, we had one of those perfect days together when you realize this is a relationship that should be nurtured; it isn’t something to be taken lightly. We had a picnic on the beach, and we hid from the wind under a bundle of blankets. It was one of those rare afternoons when you remember to be happy, and you feel it in real time. It had been a while since I had felt that way. I went to bed that night with the ocean rumbling into my dreams from the open doorway. Instead of staring into darkness, I saw hope.

I woke up the next morning to my wedding anniversary. And as I left Holly for the train journey back to D.C., the grief claimed me back.

Arriving home to my apartment, I wrote about the emptiness and the tears, and I posted it on my Substack. It was only when I called Holly the next morning that I realized how insensitive I had been.

We parted in the thrall of a perfect day. The next thing she knew, she was reading about a broken man.

The juxtaposition is a lot to ask of someone, perhaps too much for many. The idea that you can grieve and love the one you lost and still have enough room in your heart for another may be hard for people to understand. But that’s how I feel.

Michelle has gone. I know that. She keeps full custody of my past. I cherish that, and I refuse to turn away from it.

But Holly is my present. And I hope she is my future. She isn’t competing with a ghost. I think she understands that now. But it can’t be easy for her.

For my wedding anniversary this year, I am again alone. There are things I allow myself to remember and things I don’t.

I try to remember the good times, like the dinner I cooked for our final anniversary night. We dressed up in black tie in the living room, and I served home-made fish soup, chicken, and butter cake with Blue lying at our feet and Sinatra playing on the record player. It was the coda to a wonderful life together. Our Ode to Joy.

I try not to remember that Michelle was the one who talked about picking Grace up from school. She was the one who wanted to bring her home, holding her little hand across the road, and ask her about her day. She wanted to buy her pretty dresses and take her to tea and all of those things a grandmother can do that she never will.

I will not turn my back on this new life I have created out of the ashes of the old. Through the selflessness of my three children, I have found a place and a love that is helping me heal. I have found someone special who understands me. I am no longer alone.

But I can’t shake off the confused look in Gracie’s soft, clear eyes. And I remember the lesson my wife taught me all those years ago.

Loving someone is simply not enough. You need to show up.

I will be there for Grace. I don’t know exactly how yet.

But I will.