Anniversary

My paternal grandfather died 8 years ago today, after a long and varied life. He never lived with my immediate family, unlike my maternal grandparents, so we didn't see him more than a few times a year, but he was a big presence.

He was, in my memory, a great big, loud character with a booming, thick Irish accent and a limited repertoire of sayings which got funnier with volume and repetition. I associate him with fat cigars, Catholicism, the Columba club, good suits, golf clubs, crystal tumblers of Irish whiskey or gin and tonic, appalling driving and a certainty that he was the centre of his family's world, despite having a 'traditional' (i.e. distant) parental role in their lives - or so it seemed to me, though such perceptions are utterly subjective. I've heard a couple of fairly shocking quotations which, even said in jest, strike me as hurtful - but I guess the nature of love is the capability to hold contradictory views of the same person.

I got to know him a little better in my late teens - I tried my first cigar with him, and would accompany him to the Columba (a very depressing drinking establishment for Catholic men convinced that the world was now rubbish) where I'd sip Guinness as he downed a foul mix of lager and bitter ('two-stroke': despite being a doctor he claimed it was low calorie, that smoking was harmless, that he was in tiptop health and hat rather than him going deaf, the world was conspiring to whisper in his presence) and bemoaned the state of the country, interspersed with familiar jokes and routines which I enjoyed hugely. I always hoped I'd downed enough Guinness to counteract the justifiable terror of being a passenger in his car, until I realised that the human stomach couldn't hold that amount of Dutch courage without bursting.

His death was a surprise, despite my awareness that he was getting on and not in the best of health. I didn't see him often and I'd been away for a while, so hadn't witnessed illness, participated in hospital visits or observed the inevitable decline I'd experienced with my mother's father, who was ill on and off for my whole life, and with whom I spent far more time. Instead, what I saw was a redoubtable, practical family effort: a large, dignified funeral (which included the beautiful Irish hymn Ag Criost an Siol* which I'll have at my funeral to console the Catholic family after they've had to endure The Red Flag and the Internationale) with mourners from across the diaspora, some determined drinking and the quiet sadness which passes for emotion in Irish families mixed with, of course, a lot of laughter. No doubt tears flowed, but not in public. As the oldest of the grandchildren in my early twenties, I shuttled between the conversations of the next generation up and the younger cousins, most of whom I didn't know very well - Mary in particular, who would have been about 7, devoted herself to making sure the Cousin Vole was never without a gin and tonic. We've been friends ever since.

Did I miss him? I did, though not in obvious ways. Birthday cards didn't stop, because he'd always left that kind of thing to my grandmother, but the familiar patterns of family visits altered and there was, for a while, an emptiness about the place and, despite his overwhelming personality giving my grandmother little breathing space, she naturally took a while to adjust to a life without him. Gradually, she expanded to fill the spiritual space he'd occupied and we became even closer.

*Amusingly, this video of Father Ted and Co The Priests singing the hymn is accompanied by adverts for meeting single women - even YouTube understands what went wrong in the Irish church.