Today was my grandad’s funeral. Sadly, due to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in the UK, only 9 people were allowed to attend so I was unable to be at Kingston Crematorium to say goodbye in person.
I wanted to mark the life of such a special person in my own way.
My grandad, John, was a loving, sweet man. My dad has written in his eulogy that “no one had a bad word to say about him”, a truly remarkable feat which – for anyone else – I’d secretly dismiss as hyperbole. With my grandad I have no trouble believing it is actually true.
Only narrowly missing active service during the Second World War, he did his National Service in the RAF from 1946-48 (he came home from Singapore on HMT Empire Windrush; the ships next destination was Jamaica where it brought back the first large group of West Indians to Britain later called the ‘Windrush generation’). He spent much of his working life working as a television repairman in The Record Shop on Tolworth Broadway, Southwest London.
He met my nan, Anne Nash, at a Valentine’s Day dance. They married in 1950 and had three children, Vivienne, Lynne and Bernard. John and Anne were happily married for 61 years before my nan passed away in 2011.
I can still hear their laughter, as individual to them as their fingerprints. My grandad’s face would light up like a little boy, especially if he was laughing mischievously at something he’d done to wind nan up (which would invariably be followed by an exasperated shriek: “oh, John!”)
Looking at my family, I can see how my grandad ‘lives on’ in a human sense; my brother bears a noticeable physical resemblance to him and my dad inherited the same problem solving mind and propensity to fix and mend anything.
But there’s a deeper legacy. Together, my nan and grandad raised three children who have all faced the challenges life has thrown at them with the same grounded tenacity they learnt from John and Anne. The loving home they provided and faithful marriage they demonstrated has flowed into my parents’ marriage and the lives of my siblings and I.
One of my favourite quotes is from “Middlemarch” by George Eliot (1872) which so beautifully evokes the importance of so-called “unimportant” people.
“the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
My grandparents are people who, unlike the Second World War or COVID-19, won’t be found in any history books. But my life has been made all the safer, all the easier, all the more loving because of them. They are the most important people in the world.
While my grandad’s death is an end, it isn’t really. To quote the wartime Vera Lynn classic that my grandad would have heard countless times as he took shelter from Nazi bombing raids: “we’ll meet again”.
As overly sentimental as it became and has become, that song spoke so deeply to so many of the very real hope that husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, would be able to hug and laugh and cry together again after the war was over. For those whose loved ones never came home, this song took on a deeper, poignant resonance of the hope of a future reunion beyond this earthly life.
Two thousand years ago, a man named Jesus said this of himself:
““I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” – John 11:25-26
It is into the arms of this saviour that my grandad passed peacefully on 1st May 2020 after a week of deteriorating health at the age of 91. While he has left us here without his earthly presence, he is more alive than ever before.
To quote Rev. Eric Milner-White:
“let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one.”
My grandad now lives on a different shore and in a far greater light, in the presence of the God who changes everything: a God who became human, who made the blind see, and transforms death into life. All out of a pure, untainted, unconditional love for imperfect people like grandad John. People like you and me.
So today there have been tears, but they are not without hope. And all that hope rests in love; all that my grandad gave to me and my family, and the love that God extended to him and all of us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that we – though we die – may live forever if we put our trust in Him.
I love you, grandad, and look forward to seeing you again.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” – John 3:16
The Road to Emmaus 