Happy New Year. Your grandfather is dead.

I couldn’t make it home for Christmas this year. My parents flew to New York to spend a belated holiday with me and my partner. Today, my mother told me that that her father — my grandfather — died overnight.

It wasn’t much of a surprise; it was inevitable. His health had declined rapidly in the last few months.

My parents are on a flight back home to Britain, my partner is on Long Island to spend time with her teenage sister who has her family home to herself, and my cats have no idea what’s going on — and, probably just want to be fed. And I’m sat here at home in my apartment mourning a person I didn’t know but felt like I had a connection to — like a dead celebrity. You know who they are, but you know nothing of them: their intricacies, the nuances of their personality, or anything personable about their character.

I didn’t know my grandfather. It wasn’t my fault — it was entirely his. My elder brother and I were young. He wanted almost nothing to do with us, except when it was convenient for him and his wife, my grandmother, who also showed little interest in her daughter’s family.

Thinking back of him, little springs to mind of him except a few tail-end, faded memories. He was a stocky and tall, at least he was as I looked up at him as a small child. He was to me aa giant who wore woolen sweaters and corduroy trousers. He had pristine bright grey air, and a sizable belly gut that rippled with his roaring voice. Beyond that, I have a snipped of just a few seconds of me very young, throwing up in the back of his car in a brown paper bag from a visit to Skegness, a seaside town in the north of England near to where I grew up; and a later recollection of seeing him briefly on a passing visit to my family home when I was in my early-teens.

That was almost all I knew of him.

Anything else I have resembled a scatter of second-hand points of view from my mother, who as a child fondly remembered her father’s presence but later became more and more disconnected and disassociated from him as he became increasingly detached from a view on life that was anything but positive and optimistic.

And yet, a man, who had almost no impact or meaningful part of my life, I mourn, because there could’ve been a relationship. There could’ve been something more than a scripted and semi-automated birthday card with the same stock response, or a rare drive-by and convenient drop-in as they drove through the village and thought they might as well park the car for an hour. There was a point at which there was a decision made, consciously or otherwise, not to be a part of my life or my brother’s life.

A man is dead, and all I’m left with is trying to figure out why I, and my brother, were such an inconvenience to him.