Anna || HS

Anna 2- Epilogue August

*** All of the epilogues for the children are written from Anna's perspective looking back. The children are now adults and she is remembering how each weathered the loss of their father and grew into adulthood. 

~August Michael Styles~

Birthday: 11/17/16 (Age at Harry's death: 6 years old)

As our first child, August will always occupy a different space in my heart than our other four children do. He has always been wise beyond his years and ridiculously charming, to boot. He gave Harry and I so much grace as we figured out how to be parents, making so many mistakes along the way that he had to help us learn from. He was then (and continues to be now) the most incredible big brother, which makes sense if you think about him having four siblings so close to his age. It came as no surprise to me that when he became the little man of our house at age six, he took the role seriously that he never really stopped, even after moving out for college.

He won the title of the family organizer by the age of ten. Lord knows somebody had to step up and do it and though we continued to have Emma, Harry's PA turned family manager, and Marit and Viv through the years, it was August that kept us on time. It was his jam, which was good because it was never my strong suit. He and Florence plan all our family gatherings and keep us generally organized with a giant family calendar to this day.

He has lived up to every expectation and hope we'd ever had for him, and more. Yes, he has so many of Harry's physical features; his eyes and his dimples are still the most prominent, but in adulthood he has some of his mannerisms, too. When he is worried, he does this thing where he scrunches up his nose and purses his lips, and it makes me smile to think of all the times Harry gave me that exact same face.

What you can't see is that the best qualities August got are Harry's kindness and his ability to always see the good in others. As a child, I can count the number of times, on one hand, that August was ever truly rattled or upset to the point of being mean or unmanageable.

One of those times was a few days after Harry's death. Anne and I were discussing a public viewing, but there was no body to view and so we shifted to planning a public memorial. I remember him being alright with it initially, but then the day of the service he came up sobbing. He had been to my Gram's funeral the year before and remembered being able to see her in the casket. The thought of never seeing his dad, even at his funeral, was too much for his sensitive little six-year-old heart and the rest of the service was clouded by lots of tears and frustration. I hate that those moments exist forever for public consumption because photographs of him being inconsolable while we left the memorial service, were then, and are still now, some of the most searched images related to Harry's death.

His sensitive nature also came from his father. Through his teen years, he tenderly loved his siblings, with a patience most middle schoolers didn't possess. Especially middle schoolers with the last name Styles. Gus, which he became known as to his friends in middle school, wanted absolutely nothing to do with music. He remembered, the most of all of our children, the lifestyle that we lead in his years before school. He remembered being on the road. He remembered his uncles, Tom, Tyler and Mitch, at the house for days while Harry was writing music. He didn't want to listen to Harry's music until late into his high school years because the songs brought whole different memories to him than they did to his siblings.

In high school, he switched to a new school with different friends that had the priority of getting into college instead of using their mommy and daddy's names to skate through. He liked being known for being a good student, instead of Harry Styles' son. His senior year, he begged me to study abroad in Sweden. I reluctantly agreed to send my bubbs away for four months. Mostly because I knew that those four months would pull him away from me and towards the rest of his life. Even though I knew it had to happen, it was still hard to let him go, but I did.

He was only three hours from Oslo at his placement in Sweden, so he became even closer to his cousins and his uncle Erik. When he came home, he had a new desire to work in the other family business- architecture. He ended up studying Architecture in Sweden after high school. It was at that university that he met his wife and now business partner in the London-based Styles Design Cooperative. He was always very reluctant to use the family name to get him anything, but Eiley ultimately talked him into honoring his dad with the company name.

Each of our children ended up in different corners of the world, taking over one of our houses when they did. August and Eiley moved into the house in London. It seemed fitting to me that he end up there with his family, since it was always is favorite place to be growing up. Speaking of that family, He and his wife had four children; Ollie, Clara, Maryam and Filip. They are the pride of his life and August as a father is the (sometimes painful) spitting image of who Harry was as a dad to him and his siblings.

My sweet boy, has grown into a man that Harry would be immensely proud of, and I tell him that every time I get the chance.