Aaron

you know when you spend a day in a complete haze. your eyes hurt from crying & trying not to cry. you head hurts cause you forgot to eat but your belly doens’t. well i am now thinking after a night nurse induced brief coma, that this is not going to be 1 day but a while. a long while. and this feels odd to me, i’ve always been able to soldier on. i’ve always been able to keep my extreme emotional reactions under wraps cause from a very young age i realised that the world is not friendly to emotional extremism. but this… this makes me want to abso-fucking-lutely burst.

my baby brother, this beautiful soul who came into my life and worked ridiculously closely, sometimes too closely for 7 years … gone. just left us all behind and got to get to the real good part sooner than the rest of us. he’s cheeky like that, always up to some mischief. this beautiful boy, that only just started coming into his own and really going for broke living this life, laughing hard everyday, smiling everyday, loving everyday. i mean he was sharing the love, in all manner of ways and i am so happy he did.

this brilliant boy, who is the first person i can put my head on a block for that no one not one living soul can say a bad word about isn’t going to call me twice a week, to regale me with his shenanigans and collect a quick scold from me – to get some sleep. wrap it up. try and behave yourself this week, for at least one day. i am going to miss saying that you in person, or over the phone but i will tell you every night before i close my eyes.

i hope your parents are comforted knowing how much you were really loved, what an amazing gift they gave to this world. your brothers and sisters were the luckiest of us all to have been able to live everyday with you as your siblings.

it is odd, writing this because i feel like i have no words but i started tapping my fingers and they are coming, and there is nothing in this world that can ever subdue this feeling, but time. time will force us all to one day stop crying, but never allow us to stop missing you. time will one day allow your neices and nephews to really understand their loss but to be able to understand how to honour your life and treasure all the times they spent with you. time will make the lump in my throat that seems to have made a permanent home slowly recede. time will not heal the wound but will make it easier to bear. time will make sure that we will meet again, to have a chat, a laugh, take in a movie and a good zara & aaron talking.

but i’ll tell you this, my lovely lovely baby brother… you have the most brilliant light, that you share with the world. and that light will always keep me warm when it’s grey and rainy. that light will always make me smile. that light will always and forever shine brighter than bright because you left a little bit with everyone you came across and as we all take you on our travels through this masterful labyrinth of life, it will only get bigger and brighter and become the bestest light.

as we performers are silly enough to choose this art as a lifestyle. the cast will perform for you tonight and i know that it will be the most amazing Lion King performance an audience will ever see. it will be filled with so much love, so much compassion, so much extreme emotion, that you will be felt by all 2,000 + seated at The Lyceum Theatre tonight. and this is how you will continue to touch people whose name you will never know and we will never know because we all took that oath to bring joy to someone’s life without knowing their name, we all chose put aside our hurts to be able to heal someone else’s, and we all will love you endlessly and always, because whenever any of us who are part of This Lion King Family touch any stage at any time, we are sending our love direct to you and yours.

always and forever.

bless.xoxo