My invisible granddad

Hung out with my granny in her greenhouse this afternoon (thanks comrade Nibus for reminding me she is 98, not 97). Was amazing to watch her moving about the place. At one stage she started sharpening some rusty old knife against a grinding stone. I wondered with a sort of mixture of awe and horror if I’ll be able to do that at the same age – if I’ll even be alive.

She started rooting through a pile of old stuff and showing me various dusty old objects. Things we found included:
-a very long, slightly bent, handmade nail
-the tiniest screwdriver in the world
-an almost empty box of bone meal
-lots and lots of poisons for killing small creatures

Then we sat down for a bit. The conversation was a bit pish as she is almost totally deaf and I can hardly speak due to a bad cold. Eventually, in order to fill the silence, I pointed at the very old wooden table next to us and said ‘that’s a nice table’. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I got that for Tim when he was in hospital. It used to have castors on it so we could wheel it next to the bed.’ At first I thought ‘who on earth is Tim’, then I froze. She was talking about my grandfather, her husband, who died several months before I was born. In the thirty-one years I have known her this is the first time she has mentioned him to me. I’ve never seen a photograph of them together, never been shown anything that belonged to him, never heard a story about him or a single mention of his name. If it wasn’t for my dad telling me a little about him, I would never have known anything about him.

My dad was thirty when I was born, so my granddad and my granny must have been together at least thirty years before he died. Imagine being married to someone for thirty years and then just completely erasing them from your life. Subconsciously I’ve always felt I should never ask about him. Odd that very old people sometimes drop these pretenses and start talking about people and events from the past. Do they just not care about it anymore, or is there a sudden desire to revisit old memories in the latter stages of life?

I let the comment pass by. I have no massive curiosity to satisfy, but I let my hand linger on the warm wood of the table (it is quite a nice old table). Oddly, I think I’m happy just to have heard her say his name.