When Grandmothers Will Awoke a Fathers Memory
My father remembered me only when he learned of Grandmothers inheritance.
My life was never smooth sailing, but the hardest blow wasnt growing up without parents. It was the reappearance of the man Id once called “Dad”after fifteen years of silence. He didnt come with flowers or apologies. He came with a demand: “Split the inheritance.”
My parents split when I was four. Mum drowned herself in drink, the courts stripped her of custody, and Dad, too incapable to be a proper father, handed me over to his mother in a tiny village tucked away in the Cotswolds. He lived in the city, visiting rarelyonce every six months, if that.
I went to the village school, learned to tend the garden, to sew on an old Singer, to fish, to bundle lavender, to make jams. Life with Grandmother was simple but real. In Year 3, Dad turned up with a strangera woman. They sent me outside. When I came back, only Grandmother remained, sitting in her armchair, eyes hollow.
“Wheres Dad?” I asked.
“He wont be coming back, Lily,” she whispered.
And he didnt. He built a new family, forgetting his daughter. Grandmother and I carried on alone. I didnt weepI had her. Wise, steady, stern yet warm. She was everything to me: mother, father, friend.
When I finished primary school, Aunt Charlotte, the village seamstress, told me, “Youve got magic in your fingers. Enrol at the technical collegedont waste your gift in the fields.”
I listened. I left for London. Studied, worked, scraped by. Dad lived three bus stops from my student flatyet in four years, he never once checked on me. Nor I on him.
After graduation, I rented a studio, married James. We had a tiny flat, but every Friday, we drove to Grandmothers cottage. She adored James. She glowed when I told her I was pregnant. But she never met her great-grandson
When Grandmother passed, the world went quiet. Then came the solicitors letter: the cottage, the land, the savingsall left to me. I sobbed, not for the money, but for the love behind it.
Dad didnt come to the funeral. Not a call, not a word. He learned of her death six months later. And the will. Then, for the first time in fifteen years, he knocked on my door.
I barely recognised the greying man on my step. He didnt mince words: “Grandmothers estate should be divided. Half is mine.”
I laughed in his facea bitter, jagged sound. “Yours? Half? You left us, both of us. And now you remember? The scent of pound notes?”
He bristled, but James stepped beside me. “Leave. Willingly, or Ill help you.”
Dad took it to court. But even the law sided with me. He lost, paid the fees, vanished again.
James and I opened a tailors shop. We stitched workwearfor labourers, nurses, firefighters. Orders poured in. We lived. We built.
I never saw my father again. And I dont care to. Grandmother was my true family. I held on because she once believed I deserved more. And I live to make her proud. Somewhere beyond the clouds
