Happy Anniversary!

Every now and then I have found myself thinking of Nan and Grandad. It makes me feel bad that these thoughts haven't been as often as maybe they should have been but they have certainly been more frequent recently.
Nan died in 1997 and I can remember the day vividly. She had been in a coma for quite a while and Mum was going to travel up to the hospital to see her. "Don't go to school today Nick, come up to see Nan with me" she said to me that morning. I always believed that Mum had a sense of foreboding that day, it was so unlike Mum to let any of us have time off school, I guess she just needed someone to be there with her. I'm glad to this day that it was me, not only for Mum's sake but for mine. I was able to see Nan that day, albeit in bad way and that is a comfort.
I was closer to Nan than I was to Grandad in the sense that I could have a laugh with her and idle chat came easy. Grandad was a very reserved man who held his emotions in check. I always had a respect for him though and loved them both in their own way. I will always remember a day when I had a really good chat with Grandad about his time working on the Mullbery Harbours when I was studying the Home Front in history at school. Our conversation went on for hours and morphed from the original attempt to get some material for my project to finding out about Grandad's life from his childhood to the different jobs he had done. When I look back on that day now I wish that I had been a little bit older so that more of what he was telling me would have sunk in, like any kid I guess a lot of what he told me went misunderstood but I didn't want to stop him and ask "why?" I just wanted to hear him. It definitely made it's mark though.
He really opened up to me for the first time in years and we even talked of his wedding day which is what today was all about. It was Nan and Grandad's wedding anniversary today and I took Mum up to the cemetary where their ashes were interred so that we could tend to the headstone and place some flowers. I trimmed back the grass around the stone and Mum washed it clean with a cloth, after I had placed the pots of azaleas either side the sun broke through the clouds just for a moment and framed Mum with her head bowed in prayer over her parent's ashes.
Mum kept thanking me all the way home but this little trip was just as much for me as it was for her. We said to each other that we would make this an annual trip together, which for me is a wonderful way to approach it, celebrating a day that was special to Nan and Grandad rather than marking the days that they passed away. Happy Anniversary Nan and Grandad!