Yesterday, 11th April, was the sixth anniversary of my father’s death. I didn’t post anything about it on social media, although my twin sister put up some nice photos of her and dad together. I am wary of this date being defined for the rest of my life: of course, it will be exactly that each year (“the cruellest month”), but I don’t want to put on the brakes and dwell in the despondency of grief each time. I can accept, recognise, and still keep moving.

A few weeks ago, I was at a craft fair that my sister helped organise to raise funds for her work. There were stalls there from local artists and hobbyists, a mixture of people trying to earn a few quid from their side hustle, and creatives trying to eke out that meagre artist existence from their main hustle. My sister pointed out to me that a woman behind one of the stalls was someone we went to Omagh Academy with, but she wasn’t too sure of her name. I offered to go up and ask. “No, you can’t just do that!”, my sister exclaimed, but why not? Social convention means little to me: if you can’t recall someone and you’re curious about their name, then go ahead.

I approached her stall, with my opening gambit: “Hi. Sorry, this is going to sound odd, but I think we went to school together, though I just can’t remember your name.” But before I had finished, she said “Hi, Colin!”. Now, I haven’t seen this woman in perhaps twenty-nine or so years. My sister and I left Omagh in 1994, when the family moved to Cookstown, so she last saw me when I was fourteen, long-haired and clean shaven – indeed, nothing to shave – and what I think as completely different from how I appear now. And she knew me right away. Perhaps she saw me walking about the fair earlier on, had a bit of time to dig into the recesses of her memory bank and dredge up a vague recollection of me from school. But she still knew, and that annoys me.

I wasn’t happy with my appearance as a teenager (what teenager is?). I don’t dwell on this, but I do like to think I’ve blossomed a bit and matured into the next stage of my physicality; not a metamorphosis as such, but the tadpole has at least sprouted legs and is hopping about. But no, apparently, I am still identifiable as that nerdy fourteen-year-old boy who hasn’t changed at all in the past three decades.

She told me her name, we talked, I brought one of her photos as a present for my wife. I still couldn’t place her back in the third year of school, nothing about her face or demeanour was ringing any bells. Perhaps if I saw a photo of her from back then, the memory would be sparked, but there’s nothing, just a low, dull tone from her name alone that strikes a tiny note of recognition. This isn’t her fault, but mine; I would struggle to name you anyone but my closest friends from school, and some standout jerks. Somehow my brain marked this information as disposable, and resigned it to a part of the grey matter that doesn’t have many neurons attached to it.

Without photographs, how well do we cling onto the visual memory of a person? I think back now to the people I knew from school, hold a name in my head, and can only see a vague notion of a hairstyle, a height, freckles or rotundness for some. The ones I didn’t keep in touch with are reduced to a crude caricature, a ghost outline. It makes me wonder how well I will hold onto the visual memory of my father, stalled at sixty-nine years old, never to age any further. I don’t have enough photos of him in my possession, not enough to plot his aging and changes through the years, just sketchy jumps from one time to the next. If I wasn’t to glimpse a photo of my father in the next four or five years, would I still be able to conjure up an accurate portraiture of him?

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The day after my father’s anniversary is the day of my father-in-law’s birthday who died in January last year. I asked my wife if the occasion may the day any harder than usual: not harder, just more noticeable, she reflected. I think that’s a fair assessment.

Every year, I wonder how my mother gets through the anniversary. We’ve always talked on the phone on the day: last year when I phoned, she was with her indoor bowls group, something that took me by surprise but was grateful for. This year, she visited the graveyard twice on the day (something she still regularly does anyway, if well enough), once with my sister, once with my brother. She’s also had to contend with facing a medical appointment: earlier in the year, she was treated for skin cancer and received a course of radiotherapy for two sites in and around her nose. Yesterday, she met with a consultant for a post-treatment update. The cancer is gone in her nose, but there’s still a small site of it present near her left eye. She’s to return in four months and see how things are then, told that it’s very rare the cancer would spread.

It’s a mixed bag of news: great that the nose has healed, worrying that not all the cancer has been eradicated completely. I am concerned about the wait; I thought it was in the nature of cancer cells to grow, multiply and spread. But I’m no expert, I need to trust in the wisdom of the consultant. If after four months it has spread, another round of radiotherapy will be required. Mum is grateful that no further evasive treatment is required on the nose – worst case scenario, she would have been faced with the option of plastic surgery – but was initially “a bit upset” on finding out the news. (Talking to mum on the phone, I also find out that the day would have been her father’s birthday as well, another bit of synchronicity.) My mum is surprisingly stoic about these things, and despite gentle questioning, I’ve never been able to figure out if it’s actually a resigned stoicism, or just a brave face put on in front of the family. Either way, the development seems to have accepted. So now we wait.

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Since my mum moved house just over a year ago - downsizing after my father’s death - I've barely been in the part of town where the old house resides. It was brought by a developer, but he doesn't seem to be doing much with it. Over the past twelve months, and only really in the past three weeks, has he removed the hedge from the back lane. Otherwise, as far as we can tell, the house remains untouched.

I knew I should have kept a key, got one copied without telling anyone. I imagine it's a common temptation with people who move house, to be able to sneak back into what was once so familiar, and see if anything has changed, to soak in the atmosphere of a place some time ago you called 'home', and to know that now, it resides inside of you. It's almost a validation, a testament to prove you indeed were alive, and here, this house has all the scars to proof it. The slight patch of mould on the ceiling of an old bedroom, where inexplicably (beyond being a little shit), your cousin threw up a wad of wet tissue paper to see if it would stick (it did). The dent in the handle of a built-in wardrobe, where the same cousin fell out and knocked out a tooth (or am I conflating two separate incidences, and that happened in his house? In that case, how did the dent get there?). The holes in the inside of another wardrobe, where you once make a makeshift secret shelve to hide stuff on, which mostly only ever held your first poetry notebooks. The positions we took in the sunken hall in front of the Christmas tree, sitting around to share in the opening of presents.

You could point out how the garden looked when you first moved in, half a forest, tamed over the years and depleted as more and more shrubs and brushes were uprooted. That day with your father where you tore out a small tree from the ground with your bare hands. The grand chestnut tree that defined the whole back yard, and then have to be cut down due to rot. The paving stones that kept getting grown over by grass that couldn't be controlled in the summertime, so your parents decided to just lift up all the slabs. The two bushes that were the perfect length apart to become makeshift goalposts.

There were no markings of growing children's heights on any door frames: my sister and I were already on the cusp of fourteen when we moved into the house, and then her and I only spent four years actually living there, before we moved out and onto university or college in Belfast. But for twenty-two years my parents lived there, my mum staying on another five after dad died, until it got too much for her, and she had to downsize. My dad died in that house, the study turned into a bedroom, complete with hospital bed, and a fold-out bed for mum to be able to lie beside him. Eventually, after a few years, she decided to completely decorate the study, turn it into a reading room, make most of the light and position some comfy chairs, add in some further bookshelves.

I would struggle to recall a time I saw her read there however, Mum staying to her spot in on the living room sofa instead. Perhaps she didn't really want a reading room; perhaps she just needed to scrub the house of the remaining scene where dad had died, to reimagine the space. How could such an event not completely define a home?

One day, in the kitchen, while talking before the move and trying to figure out exactly how long she had lived in the house, I asked mum how she felt about moving. She surprised me with a confession: she had never actually liked the house that much. When house hunting, she had seen better places, closer to dad's work, but this one was just in a better location: just down the road from where my father's mum lived, a five-minute drive from where mother's mum was. Such matters win out over issues of morning commutes or even price.

I would like to peer through the windows of the kitchen, see the modest built-in table that much of family life centre formulated around, remind myself of the colour and design of the tiles and counter tops. I have no head for interior design, little interest in colour schemes or the possibilities of how to bring a room to live. Before we exited the house for the last time, I went round and took photos of all the rooms: empty now of course, stripped of any life they once hosted, reduced to a sterile meaningless without any of mum's possessions to give them a character. What I should have done was take photos when the rooms were full: to say, look, this place was once something, it was once ours, come and stare at our wondrous mess.

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I am not sentimental, but I can imagine as I get older my sentimentality growing, and perhaps I will regret not holding onto certain things. I do not own much from my childhood – off the top of my head there is that plate; a leather keyring my father own with a school photo of my twin sister and I in it; a rudimental toy wooden flute given to me as a gift, brought back from somewhere in Scandinavia I think by a school friend; a bunch of unsorted foreign stamps that I only hold onto because who knows if there is some rarity in there; and perhaps some of my earliest writings (I culled most of the rubbish juvenilia years ago, and only kept what I felt had any shred of literary merit or promise: there was a lot junked). That really that might be it, if we keep it to the pre-teen years. I never felt the need to hold onto a lot. My father gave me a small collection of interesting rock specimens, including a lump of fool’s gold, which I brought up to Belfast with me during my university days. My uncle had been a geologist, so perhaps the collection was influenced by him. For some reason that I can’t recall, I stupidly binned these, perhaps during a bout of depression, perhaps when I was moving house and looking to shred my possessions down to the basics and have less to transport, a bad judgement call making me consider the rocks as disposable. I still feel bad for doing this, although dad never asked about them. When mum passes too, perhaps the need to have items around that reminds me of them will be greater. I don’t even have many photos. Maybe I should start collecting now in preparation.

A few months ago, I was on the verge of scrapping Instagram, and slimming down on the social media front. I realised that in years to come, it would be important for my wife Geraldine and myself to have that resource, to look back at and relive some old memories. With physical photo albums largely being a thing of the past, our memories have been digitalised and commercialised. It’s absurd that in years to some, I will be faced with onscreen advertisements amidst all our memories, but we have fallen into that trap.

When my wife was eight, due to some legal mix-up with bailiffs, her mother lost their house and all the possessions within. I call Geraldine a hoarder for the amount of stuff she has compared to me, but I know that given this vacancy in her childhood, it makes sense that her need to hold onto things is greater than mine. Lately, I have been looking at images of Omagh, my hometown, on Google Earth, following the route from our old house to my school, or into the centre of town, trying to trace my way through streets I haven’t seen in years. This is my way of stirring memories, and I feel the need to revisit and trek some of these old routes again on my own, to see how much I recall, how many still remain, and how much has changed. Some Sunday mornings, I would go down to the nearby shop to get a newspaper for dad, use this time as an excuse to trek around the streets myself idly, before returning. I must have needed the time to myself, away from the house, to process all the things a pre-pubescent boy must contend with.

Geraldine and I went up to Omagh years ago and walked around, found that my primary school has been completely rebuilt, which was a shock. I have little reason to go back to Omagh beyond the need to dip into my childhood again, and would like to do so soon, to have some time to explore and see how I react to it all. I know I cannot step back into the same river, that there are different waters now between the banks; but still, let this aging child have a moment of reflection.