Clumps.

Antonym: dispersal, scattering.

At 3:30 a.m., I woke into the dark. No dream, no noise—just sudden alertness, as if an unseen hand had shaken me by the shoulders. Later that day, my mother told me her father—my grandfather—had died at that very moment. She had woken too. I don’t usually stir at that hour. It felt strange, uncanny, as though some invisible thread had tugged us both into wakefulness.

It was not the first time I had felt death arrive. Years ago, when my grandmother passed, I walked into my house and found the lights surging—bright, dim, bright again—refusing to hold steady. I flicked the switch over and over, but the current pulsed on. Only later did I understand what had gone out.

But my grandmother had been a presence. Of sorts. My grandfather was an absence. I never really knew him. He lived nearby, yet remained distant—his few visits blurred in sepia tones. And then a funeral: I was eleven when he approached me, said, I’m your grandfather. I remember the strangeness of it. A grandfather should not have to introduce himself. His identity should be inscribed in stories, gestures, the easy warmth of recognition. Instead, he was a stranger with a title.

I grew up wondering why other children had grandparents who baked cakes, slipped coins into palms, turned up at birthdays with stories of ‘when your mother was little’. My grandfather was alive, yet wholly absent. The explanations I heard shifted with the years: he had been strict, sometimes violent, certainly bigoted; my mother had wanted to protect us; perhaps, most simply, he was never interested. As a child, I could not comprehend that. To be a child is to believe that adults owe you love. If it is withheld, you assume it is your fault.

Over the years, while working in the arts, I would sometimes find myself in the same room—or face to face—with portraits of my grandfather’s step-son. The absence hit me hardest then. I never felt compelled to introduce myself to my step-something—whatever name that kind of estrangement deserves. I’m told I met him once or twice when I was younger, but if he ever glanced my way in any of those art galleries or private events, he would not have known who I was.

Scrolling Instagram a few mornings after my grandfather’s passing, I saw an image of a hand—pale, veined, fragile—being held in another’s. My grandfather’s hand, clasped in the familiar grip of his step-son. The actor Hugo Weaving. For decades, my grandfather had been married to his mother. They had a nickname for him: Clumps. They had their dinners, holidays, and their language of belonging. They knew him well enough to tease him. I never did.

Even the name Clumps suggests the opposite of everything he meant to our family: scattered, dispersed, estranged. Certainly not a cluster, bunch, or anything growing closely together.

The photograph startled me: proof of tenderness, just not directed at us. It revealed him as he was for others—a man held, comforted, loved. I looked at his hand and thought of all the times he had withheld that touch from me and from my siblings and my mother. In my twenties, I searched for him online—the way one does when gaps in a story itch. I found scraps: an article about him running the City2Surf, a photo at a dinner table, smiling among his new family. He looked content, fulfilled. It was bittersweet: relief that he could be happy, but sorrow that he had chosen it elsewhere. That smile was proof of possibility—just not with us.

When dementia came, the possibility of knowing him dissolved like fog lifting from a hillside. Whatever stories he carried—his childhood, his choices, his explanations—vanished. He became unknowable. Perhaps he always was.

What does it mean to inherit not presence but silence? To carry forward not heirlooms, not recipes or anecdotes, but a blankness? For a long time, I thought it meant I was cut off from half my story. Our Scottish heritage—the line back to the Highlands, the centuries behind it—felt sealed away. I longed for the missing link, the family narrative that might make me whole. I think this might be the reason I wrote an entire manuscript set in the Highlands. Maybe it was a way to write my story and connection to the lost lineage into existence.

But absence, too, is a kind of inheritance. My grandfather taught me by leaving what he could never have by staying. He showed me that blood is no guarantee, that family is not automatic, and that we must choose how we will be with one another. His absence became its own kind of presence, shaping me, teaching me resilience.

Most of all, it taught me gratitude for my mother’s choice. What I once saw as loss I now recognise as love. She severed ties to protect us, and in doing so, broke a cycle. That decision has become part of my story, just as much as the man who refused to be.

There are days when rejection still flickers through me, like the pulse of those lights when my grandmother died. But mostly, I see it differently now. Families are part fact, part myth—stitched from memory, silence, and invention. Sometimes what we inherit is not stories, but the right to create our own—much like my manuscript.

My grandfather’s story ends in absence. Mine begins with the choice to turn that absence into presence—for the people I love, and for those still to come.

We cannot choose what we inherit, but we can choose what we pass on.

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Joey Hespe, 2025.

Image: Jason Phu, older hugo from the future fighting hugo from right now in a swamp and all the frogs and insects and fish and flowers now look on, 2025.