"It's All Life, Pet"

“Why do you always speak like that to your grandad?”

This is the question I am asked every time I answer the phone to him in public, be it among work colleagues or friends from uni. They’re talking about the way I slow my voice and speak in broad Geordie (“it’s not bloody Geordie, we’re Mackems”, he would say) so that he can hear me.

It is strange. I’ve lived down south since I was young, but it isn’t just on the phone that I speak with my old accent, it’s every time I speak to grandad. When they ask this question, I usually reply “he’s deaf, he can hear me better this way,” but what I really mean is… It’s comforting. It’s something that is distantly familiar. It comes naturally to me to speak to grandad that way because it feels like home.

If you know me even vaguely then you know that grandad is the light of my life. He was the father I never had. The one who came to all of my school productions, cradled me when I cried (and told me he was gonna punch the person who did me wrong) and revelled in my successes more than anyone else, even me. He was the one who always showed up for me and Dan.

Since we were just babies, the role of our second parent was filled willingly by him and my nana, but sadly we lost her in 2008. As she was a central fixture in our lives and in grandad’s, we grew even closer to him in her absence. Many of my better qualities are a testimony to my grandad’s love for us. Above all else, my grandad is my angel because I know, in his heart, he is an honest and fundamentally good man.

I’m writing this post because recently, he has been forgetting things. He’s never really been the best at remembering birthdays and the like, he is a man after all, but lately he’s been unable to recall the day of the week, whether the oven’s on or off, the last time we saw each other, the house keys... To use his words, he gets ‘foggy’ when he tries to remember details.

I’m no doctor, but as I understand he is most likely in the early stages of a degenerative disease like dementia. Such a disease is not so much a possibility but a near certainty for someone as old as grandad (he hates it when I say he’s old but at 88 it’s getting harder and harder to not blame his myriad of ailments on general wear and tear).

I know it is far worse for some, many of them much younger than grandad, and this is not a post to say how depressing it is that he's losing bits of memory, quite the contrary in fact. I simply want to acknowledge it. As well as the memory issues, he is taking a substantial amount of medication, which can’t be helping things.

He can be troubled by it; he’s gotten so furious at times that he’s told me to get out of his house and never come back, which of course he doesn’t mean. I am patient with him (mum says I have the patience of a saint). I continue making lunch or watching TV and minutes later he will move on and ask if I want a cuppa. He can be unpredictable, but usually not in a negative way, he’s just very… random.

Equally, he can have really good days. He still does his carpentry in the garage, for one. Sometimes he meets my eyes and the glaze disappears altogether. He might say something cheeky (very grandad), or maybe he’ll be able to flawlessly recall something I told him on the phone yesterday and my heart swells.

He even wants to go to Zante. I am serious. One day in the summer we were sitting in the garden eating our lunch and he said his friends on the oil rigs used to talk about an island ‘off the back of the boot of Italy’. He said it was their favourite holiday destination. I tried and tried to figure out which island he was talking about – I even got google maps up on my phone and tried to show him all the places around Italy that it could be but, alas, we couldn’t work it out.

I moved on, shouting as always because he’s pretty deaf in his right ear (but won’t get a hearing aid because he’s a proud old Northern bloke). “GRANDAD – Me and Joel went sort of near Italy when we went away for my birthday. We went to a place called K E F A L O N I A in Greece. It’s next to ZANTE…” Well before I’d even finished my sentence his face lit up ‘ZANTE! IT WAS BLOODY ZANTE!”

So now we’re going to Zante. Not sure when, but when me and him went to Lanzarote a couple of years ago he was loving the beers, plus he wanted to come to the Loft last time I went out in Weston, so maybe he’ll love Laganas…

He’s still the funniest man I know, and he remembers everything from before Nana died like it was yesterday. As you may well know, things like dementia rarely permeate a person’s long-term memory, especially in the early stages.

He knows what she said to him when he won the football pools at the pub. He knows what their dogs and cats were called. He even knows his rifle number from his national service days. We are still really happy. One of his favourite sayings (among many MANY others) is ‘It’s all life, pet’.

Notably, there is far more to this blog post than I am disposed to write. His immediate family is in a bit of a mess, and though he will never admit it, I can see that it's contributing to grandad’s growing distress. I have a deep sense of bitterness about the fact that my own name (cheeky Charlie as he would say) has been smeared with hate and anger in others’ mouths, despite the fact that I have no interest in such business.

I only want him to be happy for the rest of his time here. That is all I have ever cared about. He and my nana know that to be true, and so I’ll continue to do whatever’s within my power to give him that happiness (at the moment it is going for a Costa - we took him once when he had a hospital appointment and he LOVED it. His is a 'drinking chocolate').

I promise I will help him remember when he is struggling to find the words, nana. I will make the most of our time together before you come to pick him up, because that is the best any of us down here can do.