There’s something about this photo I love. Grampa in the middle of either explaining or enquiring. The photographs of him and his grandchildren (as babies) in the background. The picture of me from about 1980. The EPOXY 30.
Horace Ivan Price would have been 101 years old yesterday. We would have been there to celebrate his day with him. We would have taken some photos to add to those already on his wall, sweet things to eat, and our love. We would have had a wonderful day. But we didn’t.
Even now, almost a year after I held his hand as he took his final breaths, I can barely think about him without breaking down. It's taken two days of considerable effort and stress to write this. I find myself having to avoid thinking about someone who had such an enormous impact on me. Which is why it’s about time I wrote something down.
Horace, Hor’ (to his wife), Dad, Grampa (to me), GG (to his great grandchildren) was a remarkable man. I can’t assume what he meant to others but I know what he meant to me and what I have lost as a result of his absence. As he got older and frailer I spent quite a lot of time considering just why he was so important to me, mainly as I feared his increasingly imminent death. The last days of his life were some of the most desperate days of my life. Willing him to die (to be at peace and free from pain and discomfort) whilst willing him to recover (to avoid my pain and discomfort). I sat through the night with him on each of those last few days thinking how this unassuming man had come to mean so much to me and how I would cope without him.
As it turns out I haven’t coped without him. Not really. The last year has been terribly hard. Harder than anyone has really realised, me included, until very recently. Even now I find it hard to articulate what I have lost and why things no longer feel *right*. Grampa was an extraordinarily selfless individual. His whole life – or the life of his that I knew – was dedicated to others. Especially his wife Gwen, my grandmother. Owing to her physical frailties Grampa was her full time carer from before I was born. She lived a long life – until she was 96 – and he was at her side caring for her, without interruption or respite, for many decades. He never complained or got frustrated or angry. He just lived his life caring for her. Towards the end of her life – when her caring requirements were becoming too demanding for a man himself in his late eighties – he would on occasion disappear to the garage (out of earshot) for a few minutes respite, the entire extent of selfishness that I ever saw him demonstrate. Other than those few minutes now and then he lived simply to keep her in her own home. He was an amazing husband.
But he wasn’t my husband he was my grandfather. I admire him greatly for what he did for others (especially Grandma) and that is a big part of how he has affected me – showing how selfless people can be – but for me directly, well, he was just *always* there. And now he isn’t. I knew that whatever happened, whatever rubbish might happen to me (or what I felt was rubbish), whatever mistakes I would make, he would be there to squeeze my hand (with his powerful grip), to listen to whatever crazy fad I was into at the time, to say his little sayings and for those hours together everything in the world would seem just fine. And I would leave – still with the mess and mistakes – but reminded that there was someone who simply cared for me, for who I was and what I’d done (whatever it was) and just wished me happiness. I don’t think I’d appreciated just how much security I took from my relationship with him. And now I don’t have it. It’s me. My messes. My mistakes. No welshcakes. No sitting at the top of his garden watching the sunset. No picking raspberries and gooseberries. No fires on the beach. No bolthole. And of course over the last 15 years I haven’t really felt so much the need for such security but his and its departure seems to have coincided with a feeling of needing it more than I have for a long time. Maybe it’s just the same as when I lose my asthma inhaler and my chest immediately seems to tighten.
I just wish he was here. I wish I could call him now and say I was going to go down and see him Saturday. But I can’t. And the fact that I can’t is, quite frankly, rubbish.
You've sung the glories
Lived a million short stories
And the tales that you told will
No doubt outlast your years
But the heavy lead arteries
And the cameras in your blood stream
And the heartbeats from your batteries
Ticking slower and slower and still