December

Posted on December 4, 2007
Filed Under Life |

In the nine months since the death of my Grandad, I’ve not really posted my feelings on this blog. I guess primarily because the feelings were very raw at the time. They still are. However with Christmas round the corner I can feel myself bracing for the fact that this Christmas he won’t be there. The man was such an integral part of my family that it’s hard to believe that he has gone.

Last Christmas he was still in hospital and having visited him on Christmas Day morning with my Granny and my parents, I returned alone later on that night and the two of us sat in the two comfy chairs at the door of the ward and shot the breeze and ate mini sausage rolls and cocktail sausages provided by the ward staff. Looking back now there was a finality to us sitting there. Unspoken, it sat like a huge elephant in the room. I think we both knew that this was a goodbye and we were more frank with each other than we had ever been. Occassionally he would drift off into confused ramblings caused by a mixture of drugs, infection and oncoming dementia but on the whole it was the closest and most relaxed we had been since he went into hospital in the July.

My only regret from that day is that although I probably knew it was the final chapter of a long (in my case lifelong) friendship, I couldn’t acknowledge that fact and say everything I wanted to say. A broken hip isn’t like a terminal illness where you know the other person is definitely dying, so I ended up waffling a lot of shite about “when you get out” and “we’ll need to get up to Tynecastle for a Hearts match once you are back on your feet” just to keep his spirits up. In his usual placid way though he smiled and agreed, even though he clearly at that stage had given up hope.

And that was the essence of the man. Selfless and unassuming. When I was a teenager he used to return from a game of golf on a Saturday, have some lunch and then get out the (always immaculate) Ford Cortina and take us both away to a local non-league football game. Looking back I can imagine that he wasn’t all that interested in some of the games. Sometimes the weather was bloody awful and I’m sure he would rather have been at home reading the paper but he went anyway. For me.

I wish I could go back to Christmas Day last year and say a lot more rather than endless bravado and empty promises to lift his spirits. I know what I would have said. I won’t write it here.

Possibly my biggest regret is that he never got to see his Great Grandson. Two days before my Grandad died I told him that my wife was pregnant. By this stage he was like a skeleton and had stopped speaking entirely. I later learned that people close to death do that. His only means of expression became this pair of blue eyes staring up at me. When I told him that, he cried for an hour and a half. No sobbing, just tears rolling silently down his cheeks. When my wife came into the hospital a few hours later he started crying again the minute he saw her. I can only presume he understood.

We toyed with the idea of naming the baby after him (we already knew it was going to be a boy). My wife referred to the baby all through the pregnancy as Charlie if the truth be told. In the end though, I couldn’t do it. There was and only ever will be one Charlie in our family and it wouldn’t have been fair to ask such little feet to fill such big shoes.

Instead, Sam was given the middle name of Charles. One day he’ll ask about the origins of his middle name and I’ll tell him about a very nice man I used to go to the football with.

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