Beauforts

My grandfather passed away yesterday. 

He'd been unwell for a while, battling dementia, pneumonia and fluid in the brain, so it was a far cry from unexpected. That said, it's hit me harder than I expected, clenched its fist around my heart and sat heavy and unpleasantly in me. That's probably not all that uncommon given the circumstances. I'm twenty-three years old and have just lost my second grandparent in two years. Just lost the only grandfather I've ever known.

It's a weird thing to think about. To adjust to the loss of a loved one is to ultimately grapple with grief. To try and align in your head what parts of your life - and your family's life - have changed when an integral piece of it has been removed. Grandad was ill for a long time, and, in many ways, we lost him when we lost my grandmother. His rapid decline into dementia presented that for us. He went from having mostly good days to mostly bad ones, and by the end of it all he'd barely eat or drink, and barely a grip on the present. Like his anchor to time had come loose and he'd frequently end up in the crash of war or the ebb of courting my grandmother. The fast-paced hum of his days as an auctioneer. 

I hadn't seen him since Christmas, where I watched him fumble with a prawn my dad had brought him and then, when we were alone, listened as he told me with a certainty I hadn't heard in him in a long time, that he wanted to die. That he was beyond ready. 

I don't mean this post to eulogise or to soliloquy as such, more I'm just trying to arrange my own thoughts, comfort myself in a text box and the ticking nerve centre of the internet. Maybe that's a weird thing to do. I just know that it feels right just now, to try and capture parts of my grandfather in his last moments so that I can be rid of the skeletal, frail man I knew over the last year and remember the more vibrant one. The one with the quick grin and sly humour, who could talk for hours on end about aeroplanes and who had the sharp tongue of a man who survived wartime and divorce and remarriage and the loss of three brothers. Who married my grandmother and adopted my father and my sister and brother and I along with it. I want to remember his kindness most of all, I guess, and the steadiness of him. The reliability of him. I want to remember my grandad.  

That's all.