Family Stuff - Peeling Grapes for Dad

Peeling Grapes for Dad


- In the garden late summer 2005
My Dad is slipping away and all I can think of is going in and peeling him some grapes. Perhaps the tannin under the skin will perk him up. Does tannin perk you up? I don’t know; I’ll have to look it up. Dad knew lots of things, but I don’t remember him looking stuff up, he just knew. He did lots of crosswords! Mum says I should go and see him soon. Oh God! Going into London to get the train for Oxford with all those terrorists running around loose still. Who will peel them grapes when they blow themselves and everyone else up. But of course they will have peeled their own grapes in the name of righteousness and that’s just the way it is.

We don’t take the skin off of the important things in my family. We just leave it there to get tough, leaving the sweet pulp in the middle to go rotten. The heat and maturation of time forming a messy time bomb waiting to explode the contents on anyone close enough to be covered with the sticky mess of unsaid, unresolved issues. It’s just family stuff, small scale but destructive never-the-less.

Funny thing is my Dad was a Peeler, a policeman. He blew his trumpet in the police band. He wasn’t much good at reading music, he says, or reading fly shit as he called it, but he made centre stage at the Royal Festival Hall none-the-less. How do you get through life being a peeler who can’t peel and a musician who can’t read music?

Bonfire night 5th November
Dad has been given two to three weeks to live.

Oxford the following Friday 11th November
Dad looks so thin, half the man he was. Why is it when very sick people lose weight that they seem to get shorter? He is asking for forgiveness, apologising for not being the father he ought to have been. “I was half the man I should have been”. Mm, does that mean that the man I see before me is in fact a quarter of the man that the boy should have been?

Sunday 13th November approximately 9.30 a.m.
Dad has a sip of tea… for the last time. The nursing home manager says that when she went to see him later that morning he looked peaceful. “He probably had a stroke. Knew nothing about it”. Isn’t training wonderful, the stuff you can leave unpeeled for the sake of saving the relatives from the reality of what awaits them. But of course we are English! Silly me.