I am going to be ruthlessly honest: as a child, growing up, I didn’t listen to my Granddad. Or, more accurately, I did listen, but I didn’t take it in as I should have done. Why? It’s obvious: I was young, and this was not young stuff, I had decided. His words seemed comical to me, overly depressing and cynical. Words about war, words about a time gone by that seemed full of things that couldn’t be true, that couldn’t have really happened like he said. Words that I really didn’t want to know about—they put a damper on my young day and they just weren’t fun, that was the point. If it wasn’t fun then I didn’t want to know.

It was only many years later, during a conversation about skin lesions and the horrors of war, that I understood what my Granddad had been through. That was the moment I got it: I realized why he had needed to talk about these things to me. Speaking about these things in his calm, mature voice was his way of exorcising the demons of the past. By turning them around and around in his mind he was able to be at peace in the here and now. And so I felt terribly sad to know this. I felt guilt, shame and that I’d hurt somebody I loved a great deal. So after that day I made a point of asking as many questions as I could. And I really started to learn things. Things which I was privileged to know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 5:52 am and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.