On Friday we walked a wee length of the Penicuik to Dalkeith walkway, looping back at the memorial to Kane McGinley the retained firefighter from Penicuik who died aged just 25yo. The memorial sent me down a rabbit hole thinking about public versus private grief. I hate to see supermarket flowers, dead and still in their plastic and I can rant all day about balloons "sent to heaven" but actually just littering the countryside but I read every inscription on park benches and feel a quiet sense of honour when I stumble on a memorial tucked away in a corner of farmland. I'm not one for a lot of performance grieving on Facebook but I did dine out for weeks on tales of some brilliantly inappropriate social media behaviour by others. I believe you tell your story because it might be someone else's self help guide and I want to know other people's stories. We need to talk about death more, it is after all the only certainty in life.
