I had another grandfather, one without a Wikipedia page. Harry, my father’s father, died at the end of October 2004. It was my first month at university and, as an English student, I was afforded the luxury of sleeping until noon most days but when I awoke and saw multiple missed calls from my parents it was clear something was wrong that particular morning.
Harry had started smoking as a child and given up too late, so the news was far from unexpected but still, I was 20 and had lost my first grandparent.
I had not even been at Southampton long enough to know how to get from our halls to the train station and thus had to wake a friend on the floor below for instructions. If you’re wondering why he, too, was still asleep, it is worth noting that he, too, was studying English.
On the bus winding its way through the unfamiliar streets, I listened to one of the few albums saved on my iPod until I was interrupted by a phone call from Zigi, the grandfather with a Wikipedia page. He explained that this was the way things were supposed to be, children should bury their parents and not the other way round. It was a strange but comforting sentiment, perhaps the kind of hard-won wisdom that came from surviving the camps.
A school friend texted to ask me the details of the “old shivarino”, the kind of jokey construction that characterised our friendship then as now. As perhaps the least self-pitying man ever to have drawn breath, Harry would have enjoyed that. He left Germany as a child because his family had the foresight to sense the way the winds were blowing but he never spoke of the past perhaps as a result of his relish for the here and now.
Harry Richman was a genius and could turn his hand to just about anything and master it. He told a story about the time his parents went away in his youth and, rather than throwing a party, he took a Monet print down from the wall and whiled away the hours reproducing it exactly. He then switched the pictures and his mother and father never noticed the difference. Like everything from cards to chess, what he truly loved was the challenge.
A lifetime of cigarettes took their toll and while Harry would deny there was ever anything wrong, it became increasingly obvious. During my sister’s childhood, he had made a doll’s house from scratch that was astonishing in its level of detail. My female cousin on the other side, about a decade younger, had loved it enough to ask whether he might consider making another one for her. Harry, hands not as steady as they had once been, simply replied, “I can’t”.
Darren Richman
In the last few years of Zigi’s life, he told me a story about my other grandfather I hadn’t heard before. Zigi ran a stationery shop off Oxford Street and the business was struggling by the early 2000s. Harry asked to meet him for coffee and wondered whether it would help if he gave him a colossal sum of money. Zigi told him he couldn’t possibly accept as he’d never be able to pay it back. Harry countered, “Who said anything about paying it back?”
One thing always nagged at me and that concerned whether Harry’s incredible mind had gone the way of his body by the very end. The answer seemed to come when, in among his possessions, we found a poem written in the final weeks as Harry contemplated the end. He was clearly at peace and the brain unaffected. My father promptly had the thing reproduced, framed and hung on the wall of his office. I was rereading it a few months after he died when something bothered me about the penultimate stanza:
“Be not distressed, no need to pine,
An average lifespan, that was mine,
A few more years, is not a gain
If those few years, be racked with pain.
Or as some pour souls, who’ve lost their mind
And left their memories behind.”
It might have been the fact that I was studying English but the spelling of “poor” as “pour” upset me. It struck me that there had been some slight cognitive decline because this mistake was one Harry would never have made.
Weeks later my father called to inform me he’d checked the spelling on Harry’s computer and it was correct. The company who’d reproduced the poem had made the mistake. Harry had the last word then as he will here with the stanza that follows, the conclusion:
“So think of me as once was I
Don’t think upon the how and why
For as I’ll lay me down to rest
I’ll muse upon, how I’ve been blessed
Death’s at my door, in God I’ll trust
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
- Darren Richman is a writer and journalist
