Little Green Pixies

My grandad & I were very close. I was born on his birthday and I think it was very special for him to have a granddaughter as he’d lost two daughters, and a foster daughter he cared for for six years was taken away when her father remarried. One month after my eighteenth birthday (fourteen years ago now!) he died and I was heartbroken. It was Friday the 16th of February 1996. The plans started to be made for his funeral, all of the pressure falling on my parents as my dad was an only child after his sister’s deaths and my gran had worsening dementia. The only date that worked for everyone was the following Friday- February 23rd.

Unfortunately my parents had tickets to see The Roy Orbison Story. They felt it wrong that they went so offered the tickets to myself & my boyfriend- well, my fiancée as we’d got engaged on my eighteenth birthday, but they were trying to ignore that. At first we refused the tickets as it felt wrong to go to a show after my grandad’s funeral, but they insisted.

The afternoon was peculiar- my parents booked the wake in the same pub we’d celebrated my eighteenth a month earlier, something which at the time mortified me but as time has gone on doesn’t seem to matter, as I remember that last special meal at my birthday (and my grandad’s 82nd) birthday far more than I remember the wake.