After toying with the idea for many years, I’m taking part in the Tyneside Memory Walk, on Saturday 20th September, to raise much-needed funds for the Alzheimer’s Society.
My decision to sign up for this years walk was a reasonably flippant one, borne mostly out of support for a friend whose father is suffering from Alzheimer’s and it seeming like a ‘good thing to do’!
However, as the day approaches and following a very moving email from my cousin – it dawned on me just how poignant an event it is going to be for me. Even more so, following the sudden death of, ‘Mr Wonderful’, my maternal Grandfather, earlier this year; the second of my Grandfathers to devote the final years of his life to caring for his beloved wife following a devastating Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
So, tomorrow, instead of tears I will be walking in celebration of all the happy times and the memories I have of of both sets of Grandparents and my lovely Auntie Brenda – before this disease changed everything.
I wrote this story, about my paternal Grandparent’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, a few years ago. So on the eve of me, hypothetically-speaking, spending a day walking in their shoes, it seems a fitting time to share it:
The Fish Pond
It happened one afternoon when I caught a fleeting glimpse of the ‘man’; the man behind the character I had come to know and love. A moment in time, one that I will remember, forever, and a moment that taught me about hope and how to smile in the face of adversity. I’m just not sure whether this story is going to win me many friends? It is possibly one of those stories where you had to be there; but here goes…
The man was my Grandad. An iconic character I worshipped from afar. He encompassed everything a Grandad should be; his clothes were various shades of green and brown – even the co-ordinating trilby he wore whenever he went out. He smoked a pipe, he hand-built a glass greenhouse in the garden and had a room upstairs he called ‘the workshop’. ‘The workshop’ housed his collection of tools and old bits of everything, combined with the evocative smell of his tobacco pipe, which wafted around the house like the memories that float through my mind. He was the epitome of a gentleman. Quiet and gentle and the closest he ever came to swearing was the occasional ‘bizzing’.
The long winding garden was the backdrop to my childhood. It was even the place where my sister and I learned that my parents were divorcing, when I was six. There were apple trees, rhubarb, blackberries and raspberries, flowering sweet peas and a mysterious patch of horseradish. Everything was custom-engineered; a see-saw made from an old plank of wood, two make-shift swings hung from the trees and, of course, the infamous Fish Pond.
The Fish Pond was the centre of the garden and the centre of my story, as we will come to later. This was possibly, second to the telescope, the greatest of all his creations. Designed to feature two ponds, large and small, joined together by a trickling river of water, topped with flat stones that the frogs used to hide beneath. However, the pièce de résistance was a fountain, magically controlled by a switch in the garage. Still to this day I’m not sure how he pulled that one off. I remember spending hours challenging myself to run and jump from one side of the pond to the other, falling in and getting completely drenched, at least once.
Before becoming my Grandad in 1978, he was a highly regarded Lieutenant in the army, in World War II. It was during this time he met and fell in love with his beloved wife. The evidence of their wartime romance remains to this day in the, meticulously recorded, memoirs he wrote whilst they were separated. Later, he became an engineer at Merz & McLennan. I don’t exactly know what he did there but I know he was somehow responsible for the Tinsley Cooling Towers, the famous Sheffield landmark. Maybe he built them brick by brick. As a child, I thought he was capable of just about anything.
In addition to being my Grandad, he was a devoted husband to my larger than life Grandma, who sadly developed Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 68. At the time of this story, she lived in a residential care home after very reluctantly being forced to accept that he could no longer look after her himself.
I came to be in the garden that afternoon as I had been driving him to visit my Grandma, as I did every other day. It was a couple of miles, there and back. We never really talked, apart from discussing the weather. We certainly never discussed how he felt about my Grandma’s cruel illness. The only time I ever witnessed his pain was, one day, after we had been in to visit. I checked my rear view mirror and saw a silent tear roll down his face. I was touched by the bitter irony of this lonely tear against his golden, sun-weathered skin, wrinkled like tracks in the sand from all their happy holidays abroad together.
When we got back to the house, I always popped in for a quick cup of tea, before going back to work. On this particular day, he asked me to come out into the garden and handed me the fishing net. Then with a serious look on his face, not saying much at all, he motioned for me to catch a fish. I wondered what on earth the crazy old man was up to but did as instructed and went off to catch a fish. I picked out a fish, from the over-crowded pond, with no real thought about which one I was picking or why. That’s when it happened. My Grandad picked the fish out of the net and with a glint in his eye as I watched on in horror, thinking he too had lost his mind, wrapped it in a tea towel and with all his strength, smashed it down on the concrete ground. After the shock, we laughed together like we had never laughed before.
When I think about this story, I recall another memorable moment with my dear Grandad when he knelt on the floor beside me, as I cried, because my Grandma didn’t recognise me. He rested his weary head on my knee and whispered softly but intently “We’ve had our lives. It’s your turn now.”
I often wonder, when I look back on the incident with the fish, with fondness and humour, whether this was in fact the same lesson, presented a little differently.
You can read more about how Alzheimer’s has affected me and many different facets of my family by visiting my Just Giving Page here.
Good Clean Living 