herondale | shadowhunters

2

I am stood beside mum, unable to do anything but stare down at my shoes while she tightly grips my hand and holds back tears.

The birds are singing in the trees around the graveyard and the sun is beating down onto them. My grandfather's friends are stood behind me and mum, gripping onto one another.

I stare at the yellow coronations scattered over my grandad's coffin and smile for a second at a memory of him tending to his much loved garden. Gardening was something he always held a great passion for.

Tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, the flowers that he had planted and cared for, which had grown and flourished, would start to wilt and die without his previous love and care.

Not that he'd been able to care for his garden anywhere as much as he'd used to recently. He'd been too weak. Mum and I had come around every day to check up on him and take care of the gardening which he couldn't do despite how much he clearly wanted to.

Grandad, my mother's dad, had a stroke one week ago. And now it was just me and my mum.

Mum squeezed my hand as she sprinkled soil over my grandad's coffin and over the flowers scattered on top of it.

"Goodbye dad," she whispers. I lean my head on her shoulder despite being taller than her.

As the funeral guests start to file out of the graveyard, I bend down to my knees so I feel closer to my grandad.

"Goodbye grandad, I love you more than anything." I say, and it was the truth.

When I get back up, mum has already turned away from the coffin in the ground, holding out her hand to me. I reach for it, and we follow the remaining guests out of the graveyard.

"He loved you too, Maddie." Mum says to me as we follow the guests to the post-funeral reception at the pub opposite the church.

And I decide that from now on, I'm going to let things go the way they're supposed to. Not worry if one thing goes differently to how I wanted or how I thought it would, because that was just the way it was supposed to be.