Every time we say goodbye: the truth about doing long distance

 

I have a love/hate relationship with Heathrow Airport.

If I’m standing in Arrivals, it’s the greatest place in the world because I’m waiting for my fiancé. John lives in America (in Minnesota, if you know your states), so we only get to see each other every eight weeks or so.

I get there for the time that his flight lands and strategise and elbow my way to the front of the silver barriers, then spend the next 60 minutes anxiously scanning the faces of people pushing trolleys, dragging kids and shivering in shorts until I see him.

This also gives me the chance to watch other people’s reunions, which is the best way to pass time when you’re a nosy people-watcher in a good mood. Last time a family with Northern accents had brought along a scarecrow called Tommy, and I watched a tanned, slightly dazed-looking teenager run straight into his parents’ outstretched arms. You only get that in movies or episodes of Parenthood or at the airport.

There are all these mini heart-lurching moments while you wait, like when you think a man with a similar haircut could be him but isn’t, or that guy who has a red hoody is him but isn’t, and then suddenly John is there, walking towards me with a massive grin.

There’s nothing like that first hug after eight weeks apart.

Imagine holding your breath and ducking under water. Your heart is still pumping but your whole body starts prodding you to get oxygen. Your lungs burn and your brain struggles to focus on anything other than breathing.

When you resurface and take that first enormous gulp of air, you understand how completely brilliant and perfect being able to breathe is. Seriously, WOW. You feel alive, in the most basic but fantastic way. Of course, after the first couple of minutes it becomes less amazing and just regular, the way you’re supposed to live – until the next time someone throws you into the water.

After that first hug it’s like we’re continuing from the last day we saw each other. He’ll hold my hand while he tells me about the annoying guy on the plane; one of us buys coffee from Costa and the other gets a table; we get on the Tube to Central with the suitcases, and laugh at adverts.

We always have that invisible link that you carry around with everyone you love even when you’re on your own, like a notebook of names, photos and facts about them stored in your heart. Even if you’re just thinking about whether you remembered to buy grapes or what was the name of that actress in that thing, the notebook is still safe in you somewhere. It opens up when you get a message from them or you find a stupid t-shirt slogan you think they would laugh at, or see a weird-looking cat that you want to tell them about. Sometimes, when you miss them, you open it up yourself and flick through conversations, snapshots and memories.

Another way of thinking about our relationship when we’re not physically together is that it’s like a shared folder on Google Drive. It floats somewhere in this thing we know as the Cloud, and while the thing it is – the folder icon we see on our screens – is intangible, it does exist. It also has 3D components scattered around the world, in the form of server centres and wires, whose unique properties can be matched up to form that thing we know functions and operates and is completely real, even if we can’t poke it or pick it up.

The weeks in between go in phases. Often weekends are harder than days when you can force your brain to think about work for eight hours. Being busy is the aspirin to your headache. In week one you reluctantly relearn your solo routine, resenting something that seemed so normal just eight days ago. By week two that muscle memory has come back and you go into autopilot.

Weeks three to five you waver between anger, sadness and being OK. You find films to watch, meet up with friends and family, read, walk, run, see art and photography, and that stuff makes it better. Weeks six to seven you finally have a sizeable chunk to look back on and you realise you only have two more weeks to go and it's like waking up on the first sunny day.

Week eight feels like some arsehole hit the breaks so it takes forever, as you find yourself counting days and then hours.

When we are together we still have that notebook and that shared folder, but we also get to have a physical presence - to act and be seen as a team. We get to eat Ben & Jerry’s in Leicester Square or walk along the Mississippi or get excited about dinosaurs in museums or ride alarmingly shaky roller coasters. Being together is going from a Mini to a sports car. We are not the recording of a favourite song: we are the live version played on stage that electrifies every nerve.

The good thing about having to go over an ocean and some more land and stuff to see each other is that we’ve been able to travel to different cities and stay in lots of hotels. I love hotels. There’s something so luxurious about being able to walk from your bedroom into your bathroom without having to put clothes on, and the TV is right there and you only have one suitcase and someone else is cleaning your sheets.

But while those adventures have been great fun, what I miss the most are everyday things. Cooking pizza together is this big culinary project, as is going to the supermarket, driving for seven hours to Chicago while listening to morbid episodes of Serial, and just hanging around reading or watching Netflix with my feet warming up on his legs.

I can leave a room and come back thirty minutes later and he’ll still be there. I go to sleep and when I wake up I reach over and he’s warm and solid right next to me, not just a voice on a cold plastic phone connected by a dodgy WiFi signal.

Even seeing ourselves together in photos is this weirdly intriguing experience, like going back in time and showing a Roman what he looks like with a camera, because it’s this visual proof that we existed in the world in the same space at the same time. Plus, hey, there’s the Tower of London, that was fun, and damn, my hair actually looked so good that day.

And then suddenly, just as you get used to this solid, 3D life – to the oxygen you were missing – you’re back in an airport and this time it’s the Departures gate. You take one more deep breath – one more hug, one more kiss, one more moment to feel on your skin and hold onto – and then you say goodbye, turn to leave, and you take the plunge again.

How it felt to be proposed to

Dramatic re-enactment

Being proposed to is something that girls are supposed to think about. I know this because I have read magazines, watched more than one rom com and went to an all girls’ school. Once, in a year 10 geography lesson, I overheard one girl confidently telling another that she intended her intended to propose to her in a hot air balloon. Never mind that we were about 15 at the time, and as far as I know the proposer in this plan was nowhere on the scene.

I reckon that we first learn this narrative from fairy tales and their Disney rehashes. After a bit of angst you’re going to stumble across the prince, face minor peril along the lines of losing your voice/having a hit put out by your murderous stepmother/being put into coma, or some other routine Jerry Springer-type stuff, and then after a snog or two you get married.

This storyboard is further backed up by a swathe of bossy novels, which spend about 300 pages pretending that the dashing hero is never going to propose to the plucky heroine and then, bam, 83 hours of your life later that is exactly what happens. You nearly had me there Austen, you wily minx. When those have started to seem a bit samey, you move on to glossy rom coms starring beautiful, funny, successful grown women all pining over the question of getting to that moment. Oh do shut up, Bridget.

Obviously, the initial reasoning behind this obsession was based on what for most women in the Western world is now a thankfully defunct social order. Since women can now earn our own money and pay our own bills and live alone, we’re not relying on some guy to come along and provide a way out of the parental home, plus a bit of cash. We get to find other purposes in life, like a high flying career as a trapeze artist or travelling to every abandoned McDonalds in America, or learning how to do the scorpion pose.

And yet society is still so in love with love that there remains to this day sensible adult people who spend time fantasising about their ideal proposal. There are hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube to give you ideas, like the guy who buttered his girlfriend up with a puppy first (cue hysterical tears) and put the ring around its neck (cue sounds only the puppy could hear). There’s the guy who ropes his family and friends into performing a choreographed parade to Bruno Mars’ Marry You. You will cry. And hate yourself for it. And then, of course, there are the ones that don’t go so well, generally at sports games, but before we start dying inside for these guys, remember that these are probably staged. Or that’s what they’ll claim.

I am not someone who planned out how I wanted a future mystical man to propose. This is partly because, as the child of divorced parents, I didn’t think I would ever be getting married. Maybe some time after 35. And more likely never.

I had fully planned to be an old lady with purple hair, living in a New York apartment crammed with books and mad artefacts from my global travels, eating granola all day and wearing ballgowns and Converse because there was no guy around to be confused about my eclectic fashion sense. And then I went to Berlin and met someone who switched the gear on that grand life plan. Insert long story involving a deployment to Iraq and lots of Skype and over a year waiting to see each other again. I was sitting alone in Phoenix Airport, waiting for my flight back to Heathrow, when I knew that I was going to marry him, in the same unquestioning and total way that I know where the Tube doors will stop and which is the squeaky stair in my childhood home and that it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere.

Four months and a trip to London and a trip to Vegas and more Skype and many discussions later, including a 6am inquiry about what ring I wanted (er, huh?), we’re walking back to my flat after watching Bridge of Spies. Because nothing says romance like Cold War dramas starring Tom Hanks.

It’s a bit damp but mercifully mild, and late enough on a Tuesday night before Christmas that the Southbank has mostly cleared of tourists. I’m full because I've had nearly an entire bag of slightly stale-tasting sweet cinema popcorn and a cheeseburger and chips. My hair is all over the place because of the drizzle. But I don’t really care because he’s actually here, in 3D, and he has warm hands, and I have a sneaky suspicion I know what’s coming.

I’m intuitive, OK.

We get to our favourite bridge, which has a view east of Waterloo Bridge, Southbank, St Paul’s and the Shard in the distance. He pulls me gently over to the silver railings. And he gets out this white box. And time stands still.

Turns out getting proposed to is a lot like deciding to have sex for the first time. Throughout your life you’ve heard that this is a pivotal moment that will mark a dividing line between the time before you knew what all the fuss was about, and the time when you’re in the know. But it’s actually the decision itself that is more important, more formative, than the exact moment.

Standing in front of this man, who is funny and kind and maddening and caring, I decided that despite years of being steadfastly against the idea of committing to one person forever, actually, I’m more than willing to give it everything for him.

And like sex, you’re still the same person after it. That moment doesn’t change you. It’s more that you're knowingly going from one stage of your life to the next. Like levelling up or birthdays in The Sims when they spin round, lights burst out and now they’re a spotty teenager.

Then a drunk guy will come up and congratulate you on being madly in love, and you will smile and nod until he leaves.

I still don’t think everyone should get married, because you know what works for you better than some tax man or priest or nosy relative or diamond salesman. And there's no point planning how to get proposed to, whatever gender you are, because you won't know how it feels until you're there. If the method of question-asking is the most important thing to you, you've kind of missed the long-term implications.

I remember looking across the water as we turned to walk the rest of the way home. The view was the same, we were the same, but while crossing from one end of the bridge to the other, my life had definitely changed in a way I wouldn't have predicted for myself, despite all that Disney. So instead of trying to guess where my steps would fall, I squeezed his warm hand with mine and kept walking.

This old thing?

Knowing, loving and losing my grandparents, 14 years apart

Gramps and I, December 2008

Things I remember about my grandma’s death. She died 13 days before my eleventh birthday, in November 2001. She’d started having headaches in about September. I remember because it was around the time of 9/11, and the combination of events made it seem like there was this sombre shadow over the world.

She was in hospital from about October. I remember sitting in the waiting room in Watford General. There was a vending machine that served what I thought was the world’s greatest hot chocolate. It was the kind made with hot water, which formed these little lumps you could scoop out with your finger and bite into to release a burst of sugared chocolate powder. I would take this full-scale stuffed toy dog with me every time we went. It was a Yorkshire terrier (non-dog speakers’ translation: little, long hair, yippy).

I remember the smell. It must have been a certain brand of disinfectant that smelled forcibly clean. It wasn’t overpowering or heavy, but it seeped through the air and into your clothes and into my grandma, pushing out her usual scent of cardigans and walks in fields and cigarettes.

I was only 10 and no one I was so close to had died before. I believed she was going to get better with the same level of helpless faith that I had in God with a capital G and true love and my parents always being right. Every time the adults had one of their conversations in low, worried tones, peppered with medical terms and the phrase ‘brain tumour’, I maintained that simple expectation that she would be fine. Of course she would be fine. I knew they were all worried, but my belief never faltered.

I can tell you the exact place I was sitting when my mum told us that she was going to die. I was in the back right seat of her Ford Mondeo. My sister was in the passenger seat, my brother was next to me. We were going round a bend on the A404, at the point where you can take a right and go to this tiny village that is basically just a pub and some bored sheep. She said, ‘You do know that Grandma isn’t going to get better?’ None of us answered, but it felt like something I’d put high on a shelf fell off and shattered. I could hear Claire sobbing in the front.

So I only had 10 and a bit years with my grandma. I remember her short grey hair and her big round glasses, which she was always pushing up the bridge of her nose. I remember she made really good tents out of bedsheets and read us stories about teddy bears going to a haunted house and let us run through their tiny bungalow and jump on the bed like little maniacs. I remember her long floral skirts. I remember the taste of her ham sandwiches: airy white bread, olive spread, and ham sliced to this certain thickness, all cut into squares. I remember long walks and feeding ducks and the time this swan went for me (they are seriously vicious bastards) and she stepped right between us, put her finger up and said, ‘No.’ You bet that swan backed the hell off.

I sometimes wonder what our relationship would have been like if she’d known me through all my teenage years and as an adult. Those are the tough ones, after all, the ones where your generational differences start to show and you have to find the balance between needing them and loving them all the time, and reminding them that you are your own person, capable of surviving away from them and making your own life decisions.

Life changed for us all after Grandma Diz died. We all called her Dizzy, but her actually rather excellent name was Audrey Beryl May. I learned that the world isn’t fair, in the way that kids only really learn things when bad stuff happens to them. Meanwhile, in grown up world, my dad and aunt had lost their mother and my grandad was coping with losing the love of his life.

I won’t pretend that I remember what my grandparents’ marriage was like, because as I said before, I was under 11 the entire time, and mostly concerned with my Anastasia Barbie and the fate of the Spice Girls. But I remember my grandad on the day of the funeral. He looked lost. Like someone who’d been dropped in a desert and left to navigate his way out alone, with no compass or map to help.

Slowly and with lots of help from my aunt and Dad, he put together a life. At first, he would still pick my sister and I up from school on a Tuesday. I would make us both tea – his very strong, one Sweetex – and we’d have to sit and try to make conversation across this enormous gap of experience and age.

A lot of people, including both my parents, several employers and café customers, have bemoaned my tea-making skills. But never Gramps.

So I went through my awkward teenage years with my quiet, withdrawn grandad instead of my lively, fun-loving grandma. He wasn’t a great conversationalist, especially not with a 13 year old girl. I would avoid talking about her for fear of upsetting him. These conversations were tricky, but I did learn about his life.

He was in the army doing national service, and was stationed in Italy at one point. He was a crack shot and won a medal in a shooting competition, but he couldn’t afford to keep it up after leaving. He worked in a metal workshop – he was very good at shaping it into whatever he wanted. He needed a constant supply of Wine Gums. He was the kind of loyal Arsenal fan who wouldn’t shout at the TV but just stick out the rough and smooth with determined faith. When he was younger he enjoyed playing football, and he was still into golf and snooker, but those things gradually left him when the call of the armchair in the bungalow he had shared with Grandma became more appealing than a bustling snooker hall.

What was most welcoming was that Gramps was not one of those people fiercely clinging on to outdated values purely because they can’t accept the world has changed. He lived in a sort of bubble, with two TVs and the curtains drawn. He wasn’t interested enough in the world to judge people beyond whether they were hurting others or not. I never heard him say anything racist or homophobic. His motto was ‘Each to their own’, even if he couldn’t quite make sense of the ins and outs of things.

Yes, he could be difficult, and his waning interest in leaving the house and life beyond knowing the lottery numbers, Arsenal score and that we were all OK was frustrating, especially for people who did a lot for him with very little thanks. He was stubborn and tactless, often telling me that he didn’t have much to say and he did nothing all day. Not the greatest conversation starters. But that makes it all the more touching that he did push aside the fog of gloom that descended when Grandma died in order to call us just to say hello.

He’d had headaches and neck pains and emphysema for many years, which made breathing and moving difficult. He still got washed and dressed every day, even if it was just to lie on his bed. His hearing was good enough to listen to a conversation, and it was only in the last few months over Christmas that he became forgetful and confused to a worrying degree. I got to tell him that I’m getting married, which he was delighted about. In January we found out that he had an infection in his pacemaker, which could possibly be treated but would result in reduced mobility. Ultimately, it was the combination of this and an intense hip operation that finally wore him down, and he died at around 8pm on 20 January.

I had an idyllic child’s relationship with Grandma Diz that never had to overcome divided opinions or tension or the strain of miscommunication. And I also feel privileged to have got to know my grandad’s white haired self, as well as a snapshot of him in his prime, over the years when our age gaps made communicating that much harder. He might not have been perfect, but he was him, and that was enough. And I will miss him for being perfectly, imperfectly himself.

What it’s like to be a triplet

Part of me dreads the moment when the question of siblings comes up. I understand that people who haven’t bumped into many of Our Kind before are curious about what it’s like, but I still find it uncomfortable seeing your eyes widen slightly in surprise, as two more of me appear before you, like a drunken mirage. In my 24 years of experience, your first response will likely go one of four ways:

1. Are you identical?
2. I’ve never met a triplet before.
3. My friend’s cousin’s ex-boyfriend’s mother is a triplet.
4. Did your parents have fertility treatment?

Here are my responses.

1. I am fascinated by this question. It’s particularly fun if we’ve just been discussing my brother, and you’ve only found out I’m a triplet when I reveal we’re the same age. Firstly, while Matt is a fine-looking guy, I’d rather not look like him. Especially the beard. Secondly, having triplets at all is pretty freaky, having three who are genetically identical is about as likely as plunging your hand into a haystack and pulling out the needle you lost in there three months ago. OK, I haven’t checked the actual odds, but the point is, it’s not likely. I think the reason that perfectly logical people tend to jump to this one is that it helps you get your head around the visuals of three siblings all born at once.
2. Lucky me, taking your triplet virginity. Unfortunately you’re the 800^th person who’s told me that. Have a balloon and a sticker.
3. I probably know them through our secret triplet club* even though they live in Alaska. And you can definitely ascribe all aspects of their personality and life to me.
4. Er, can we please not discuss my parents’ sexual activities? On hearing that your birthday is in September, I don’t casually ask if that means your parents got a bit randy after one too many Christmas sherries, or whether you were conceived to the sound of Michael Buble’s Christmas hits, or Noddy Holder’s shrieking vocals. Luckily, it’s generally my mum who gets this one. The last person who asked me this didn’t exactly have an astute understanding of personal boundaries.

In fairness, I can understand the thought process behind these responses. Being a triplet is rare enough that it warrants comment, but it’s not a personal achievement that you can congratulate me on, or get much conversational material from. It’s even harder when I have to explain that I’m a triplet as context to an anecdote, as it inevitably sounds like I’m somehow bragging about my ‘special’ status.

Most of the time, the conversation moves on to more interesting matters. Sometimes, however, people want to know ‘What’s it like being a triplet?’ Here’s my carefully thought-through, incredibly insightful first-hand account.

I have no idea. To me – to us – you’re the freak. What do you mean you’ve never shared your birthday with two other people? How is it that you’ve never had your sibling in the same school year as you?

OK, since I reeled you in this far based on that title, I'll give it a go. On the one hand, we were all on a level playing field from the start. There’s no age-related basis for any of us to take all the responsibility (although it often gets shared out along gender lines instead.) There’s no ‘Why is he allowed to watch The Exorcist when I’m stuck with Thomas the Tank Engine?’ or ‘Why can she can drink vodka shots in the pub all night when I have a 9pm curfew?’ when you’re all the same age. The rules got made up and applied to all of us at the same time, so there was no sense of injustice over ‘But Stacey got a car when she was seventeen, where’s mine?’

There are drawbacks, too. Getting everything in one hit, tripled, can be tough. Events like exam results become highly pressured, as our parents are faced with comforting and celebrating at the same time. Worse than that, however, is the tendency for others to view us as a big lump, vaguely divided into three. As any siblings can attest to, this was probably not helped by the matching clothes (thanks for that, Mum).

This is less of a problem now we’re all spread out and making our own friends, but when we were younger, we were very much viewed as ‘The Triplets’. Even when alone, it often felt as though people could only properly place me when they remembered that ah, yes, you’re one of the three. Even science turned against us: I remember one dispiriting program where Professor Robert Winston cheerfully announced that the reason humans don’t give birth to more than one child at once is so we learn to love our offspring as individuals, and are therefore more likely to take care of them in the face of sabre-tooth tiger attacks. Thanks, Bob.

This tendency to picture triplets as clones, rather than separate people, is even funnier because the three of us are as different as, you know, ‘normal’ siblings. Matt speaks rarely but thoughtfully, and has an outrageously dark sense of humour and a love of horror films that would leave me sleeping bolt upright with a shotgun for months. Claire has a beautifully artistic mind and the skills to match, is very messy (own it, sis), and incredibly empathetic. I am bossy, efficient with everything but timekeeping, and with a tendency to babble into any conversational silence. Yes, there are similarities between us, like our eyes and a fondness for feminist outbursts, but no more than you would expect from fraternal siblings of any age gap.

Similarly, just as people assume the youngest child is spoilt and the oldest is in charge, being a triplet has not endowed me with personality traits you might expect someone who's always been flanked by two others to have. It definitely has not made me good at sharing. I tend to be independent, and I don’t like being told what to do, and I never have.

I’m sorry to squash anyone’s fantasies about how amazing it would be to have a sibling who can double as another you, as seems to happen in all those delightful books you grew up reading (Double Act was a personal favourite). However, the happy truth is that any siblings, or even friends, who spend enough time together can develop that almost uncanny psychic bond. You don’t need to share a womb, a birthday cake or a bloodline to connect with someone like that. 

Ultimately, I know that as with having a sibling of any age, the experience of being a triplet has shaped my identity and my life. However, I’d also like to think there are more important and interesting things to me than the fact I share my birthday with two other awesome Lavenders.

*Actually, there is a secret triplet club. It’s called Super Twins, which is a term for multiple births of more than twins, who apparently aren’t impressive enough any more. It wasn’t actually the place where we all made triplet-only conspiracies as much as an opportunity for our parents to find solidarity and alcohol while we all ran riot in whoever’s house was due to be destroyed that month.