Recently, I’ve been trying to write an essay a week. I use the time during my commute to work in Newcastle to pin down my thoughts about the arts, politics, and life in general. Some weeks I feel clever. Some weeks I feel furious. Today is firmly a life in general piece, and whether I like it or not, it wanders straight into philosophy, grief, and the unbearable strangeness of being alive when someone you love has stopped.
On Friday morning, the 30th of January 2026, at approximately 10:15am, my little nana June took her very last breath.
The Thursday before was manky and tempestuous. A heavy fog and relentless rain smothered the North East in a suffocating, grey twilight. Fibromyalgia is crap at the best of times, but one of my worst unwanted superpowers is that I can feel changes in air pressure before they properly arrive. When a storm is coming, my blood feels like it’s expanding inside me, my joints throb, and my whole body lights up with pain.
I’d gone to bed early on Wednesday night, already exhausted, and by around 2pm on Thursday I had to lie down again. The pain and dissociation had me completely out of my tree.
Scene set: the day was shit. Full of pain, rain, and darkness.
I went to bed at 9pm, empty and worn out. At 9:30pm my phone started ringing. No one ever phones me. I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb from 8:30pm, except for emergency numbers like my mam or my sister.
So when I saw my mam’s name, my stomach dropped before I even answered.
She had to tell me some of the hardest news she has ever had to share. Her mam, my beautiful little nana June, had collapsed while putting her shopping away. She wasn’t expected to survive. The call was short. There wasn’t anything to soften it. I got out of bed again and, through sobbing breaths, told my partner what I knew.
Every part of me wanted to dash straight to the hospital, but the fibromyalgia had already been battering me all day. I cried, helpless and furious with my own body. Eventually, I went back to bed and passed out from sheer exhaustion.
The next morning, when I opened my eyes, the pain was still there—but manageable. I moved as fast as I could. I got dressed, barely thinking, and ordered an Uber to the hospital reception.
I’d already been crying since the moment I woke up. I might have been crying in my sleep too. The hospital staff pointed us in the right direction with quiet voices and practiced kindness. The room was small, overheated, and packed tight with my family, clustered around the hospital bed like sad sardines.
The heat was unbearable.
We towered above her, even when we sat down and held her hand.
Nana was always small, but now she looked like a tiny grey doll, waxy and fragile. Her breathing was rasping and foamy. Every so often her lips would move, her head would nod slightly, as if she were trying to answer something only she could hear. The nurses told us she could hear us.
I held her tiny, papery hand and stroked it gently, willing whatever strength I had left into her.
“I love you so much, nana. It’s Jo. I came as quick as I was able. My sister and mam are on their way. Everyone else is here. You’re surrounded by love. We all love you, and we understand if you have to go.”
I’m writing this on the Metro home, my face burning again as hot, salty tears blur the windows. I don’t know how I got through the rest of the day. It’s just a blur of trying not to be grumpy, or sad, or exhausted—and failing miserably. I was probably a dickhead for most of it.
Doesn’t the world realise that something fundamental shifted? That it became darker and less amazing when she left? Why does everything keep cracking on regardless, as if nothing has happened?
Nana June was born in June 1936. She was sent to live with her own nana at the age of 11, in a time when children were expected to just get on with it. She married my grandad at 19 and became a mother to five children by her mid-thirties.
One baby, Deborah, only stayed for a few days one August. Every August since, a butterfly appears—as if on cue—to share her spirit. Nana carried that grief quietly, the way women of her generation so often did.
She survived my grandad becoming seriously ill with Crohn’s disease. She carried our family through thick and thin without fanfare. She cared for her own mam twice a day, every day, until she died at the age of 96.
She celebrated grandchild after grandchild. Great grandchild after great grandchild. She rejoiced in 70 years of marriage. Let’s just take that in – 70 years of being together.
Her laugh was so wild and contagious that once it started, everyone joined in whether they wanted to or not. Her love was enormous and radiant—so big it wrapped itself around everyone who ever met her.
And the scones. God, the scones. So famous she probably fed half of Sunderland with them.
Grief is strange. It’s not tidy or noble or poetic in real life. It’s sore and inconvenient and badly timed. It leaks out in supermarket queues and on public transport. It makes you angry at strangers for smiling. It makes your body heavy and your brain foggy. It leaves holes in you that don’t make sense to anyone else.
My heart has a nana-shaped hole in it.
I hope, in time, to fill it with love—the kind she gave so freely. Right now, though, it just hurts. And I miss you.
About the Author
Jo Howell is a writer based in the North East of England. She often uses her commute into Newcastle as thinking and writing time, exploring the intersections of art, politics, disability, love, and everyday life. Her work is rooted in honesty, working-class experience, and emotional clarity, and she writes to make sense of the world—especially when it doesn’t make sense at all.