Hannah Fry Instagram – This is my wonderful dad – the last of the Frys – who finally left us a few days ago.
I don’t know if you can tell from the photos, but my dad was so British. He liked only fools and horses and pebble beaches and food without any flavour, like bread and butter pudding and gammon egg and chips. He spent his childhood hiding from the blitz in a cage under his kitchen table, and from teachers and policemen while playing truant from school. His youth, he spent covered in motorbike grease and oil, spray painting cars against a soundtrack of Pink Floyd. And his adulthood surrounded by women – an entire dynasty of female only descendants.
Alzheimer’s isn’t the disease people like to pretend it is. It isn’t about losing your keys and thinking you’re in your childhood again. It’s so, so much crueller and more horrifying than that.
But i remember him before, when my dad was smarter than at least half of the professors I’ve ever met, and more capable at building things and fixing things and inventing things than practically anyone.
He was a man’s man in the quietest possible way. Not a big drinker or partier, he didn’t demand attention or make himself known. But when he had something to say, it would be razor sharp, insightful, and delivered with devastating precision. My friends called him the conversational samuri.
He’d been born in the days when polio routinely robbed young men and women of their prospects. So he left school with no qualifications and ended up trapped in a blue collar job, fitting hydraulic lifts on trucks for decade after decade. Some would say it was a waste of his talent. I would say it was a waste of his joy.
He came alive again once he retired. And then we had nearly fifteen years of unrelenting mischief before the Alzheimer’s took hold. Building rockets and forts and fires and dolls houses and rocking horses, watching fast cars and playing pranks and hiding and seeking and laughing and teasing and I loved every single minute of it.
Goodbye dad, i had so much fun with you x 💔 | Posted on 17/Feb/2025 22:45:07
