Grandpa

Just occassionally it seems as though the world conspires to allow certain events to take place and to put us in the right place at the right time to be there for them. My grandfather collapsed and died of a heart attack not even 24 hours ago. In the midst of christmas breakfast, as I tried to explain about the Tokyo Earthquake museum to him and my uncle, he choked and collapsed and within minutes died in my mum's arms, as I gave him CPR til the ambulance arrived.

My Grandpa was an un-assuming man.

I think one of my first memories is of him gently 'assisting' me with a jigsaw puzzle that was just a bit too difficult for me. He would secretly place the pieces above the slot they were to be located in and nod at my noisy satisfaction when I saw how they fitted together and felt as though I was being such a help to him in the jigsaw making process. Years later he followed Mina and my travels through South America. He was a traveller from his armchair in Norwich and would write to ask for more details about the exact name of the cities and towns we were travelling through. I don't think anyone, other than Mina and I understands our journey quite as intimately. He knew the longitude and latitude of each location and would inquire about the practicalities of a bus route through a particular part of the Andes or what the landscape was like in Ipiales. He was waiting for us when we returned back and spent days examining the thirty something rolls of film we had taken and choosing the best photos (to this day there is no one else who has actually seen every single one of those photos, as even the most enthusiastic sibling or parent grew bored of our endless salt lake snaps). But Grandpa had an insatiable, unassuming and quiet desire to know. The map he and my dad created of our trip, complete with the six best photographs and a key to define what mode of transport we had used in each section of the trip, still hangs on Mina's wall. He had loved travelling in his day. When he retired in the seventies he had travelled, with my grandma overland to India. He loved India. And he continued to love jigsaw puzzles, though I remained just as useless at helping.

As he reached ninety and his stays in our house became longer and longer, he kept at the puzzles and the arm chair travelling. Whenever I was home I tended to overlap with his visits and my brother, he and I would sit in our kitchen in front of the world map we have posted on the wall asking about Afghanistan or Iraq when he was travelling through them.

Two days ago he was asking me to tell him the difference between Indian green tea and japanese green tea - and I was so pleased that I had some all wrapped up ready for him to try on Christmas day. Two days ago he was giving me his point of view of the invasion of Iraq. He had been an engineer, posted in India during the war years, and so of course to him the practicalities of how important it should have been to set up water pumps from the Tigris into Baghdad within days of the invasion was clear. Two days ago, hearing my frustrations with japanese learning, he told about having to learn Tamil, in order to command a troop of indians during the war years. When he arrived back at headquarters they were so impressed with his Tamil - but he claims his knowledge was most probably 'army' tamil, complete with all the colourful accompanying vocabulary.

I have never been placed in a position where I have been fighting for someones life with them, breathing into them and measuring for a pulse as I've pumped their blood round their veins for them, praying that the ambulance will come soon. I've never watched someone I've loved having a large volt of electricty applied to them in the hope that their heart will start.There is something beautiful and intimate about the way in which my grandfather died. Surrounded and in the midst of people who loved him deeply. Our family broke out of Christmas yesterday and were untethered from any norms of how it should be. We turned the guests, supposed to be coming for lunch, away at the door, admidst the undertakers, the police and the local vicars. We trudged through the almost empty local park, as the height of christmas revellries behind the windows of suburbia played on - without us. Late that night we did have a christmas dinner - there was one extra chair at the table and my mum's usual toast faltered, as none of us dared to voice who we were all thinking about for fear that even this superficial display of the normality of an evening meal would break. My flight back to Japan leaves in just over 12 hours and I don't know if I can get on board.