People have suggested to me, more than once and usually kindly, that my father was a poor judge.
He was not. He was a man of sixty-eight who had just been told what was wrong with him, and he was putting his affairs in a state where his daughter would not have to do everything alone, and he chose the steadiest person in the building.
And he was right about the steadiness. That is the awful part. Grady Foyle is genuinely the man who turns up when your car won't start. Both things are true and they were true at the same time for five years.
My father died on the ninth of April, 2021. Eleven weeks after signing that authority.
And the last full conversation I had with him, in a hospice room, included the sentence: "You've got a good one there, Wynnie."
I have decided not to do anything with that sentence. It is not a message and it is not a joke at my expense. It is just a thing a dying man said about a man who was, at that moment, paying his mother's care home out of my father's rent money
