So few adults ever have the opportunity to really get to know their grandparents. I have been so lucky to know you into my 30s and to have developed such a firm friendship with you, in spite of (or maybe partly because of) the 65-year age gap. So much of this is due to your warmth and wit. I never shared the complaints I would hear from others about having to endure awkward conversations with their elderly relatives. You and I would sit and talk for hours, simply enjoying each other’s company, and I loved the weekends spent visiting you.
My sister and I stayed with you as teenagers a few times when Grandad was still alive, but our relationship really flourished once I was a little older and the two of us began to spend time alone together. You were always keen to hear about what was going on in my life, especially when I lived abroad and was experiencing things you never had – and to learn about life as experienced by my generation (I’m not sure my fudged explanation ever helped you to understand how the internet actually works).
In more recent years, as I pressed you more, you began to share anecdotes from your past. You didn’t have an easy life, losing your father when you were very young, then coping with the effects of Grandad’s traumatic war experience. But you still had a store of funny stories. I particularly enjoyed the one you shared with me about your friend who always had a good supply of stockings during the war because she’d receive them from the American GIs she hung around with – and would drag you along to church while she confessed “whatever she’d been doing to earn those stockings”.
It was a testament to your warm character that the carers who looked after you in the last few years spoke of you so highly – and even some of those who had changed jobs would still pop by to say hello. Taxi drivers always had a fond word to say about you when they dropped me at your house. You relished company and would strike up a conversation with anyone – in a pub, sitting on a public bench, waiting for a taxi. You were the one who rallied your friends to keep going out for regular pub lunches even as they lost their husbands and you all became increasingly frail. Even more impressively, if they weren’t up to it you’d simply go by yourself.
Given that you had reached the age of 96, it seems absurd to say that your death came as such a shock. But you deteriorated so suddenly after your fall just over a year ago that none of us had time to prepare for it. My mum (your daughter) and I later admitted to one another that we had been dreading your death for years. Even now I occasionally struggle to accept that it has finally happened.
I will remember you as one of the most optimistic, cheerful and resilient people I have ever known. When I am an old woman myself, I know I will think of you and I’m sure will appreciate more fully what an excellent example you set. It will be in no small part down to you if I succeed in following it.
Your loving granddaughter,
Alice
