I’ve been sad to see a lot of posts this past week about people’s grandparents dying, and touched to read a bit about their lives. My Grandpa Murray died this afternoon, too. He was 94, and though he lived with Alzheimer’s for the last decade, he was lucky enough that his was a mostly peaceful case.

Grandpa Murray was born in 1926 in Lancashire, in the north of England. His family was very poor, but Murray excelled in school and earned a scholarship to attend a private school in Manchester. Though his education was interrupted by World War 2, during which he was evacuated to the country and he worked on a farm to support the war effort, he made it to Brasenose College at Oxford at the age of 16. He most loved to study the Classics, and by the time he was in his final year there he was made Senior Scholar of the college, which he would proudly tell us meant that no one could eat until he’d shown up and recited a particular Latin verse. As a poor Jewish boy, though, he was persuaded that rather than focus in Classics, he should become a doctor in order to earn a better living. He succeeded there, too, and after specializing in one thing, and then in another, he became a professor of anatomy, lecturing and teaching medical and graduate students across Europe, Canada, and the Caribbean. Some of his illustrations of the blood supply of bones are still in Gray’s Anatomy (though beginning in the 39th edition back in 2005, they mistakenly began to call him “the late” Professor Murray Brookes) (see, e.g., Figure 5.20). Powerfully eccentric himself, he by all accounts made bizarre friends across the world.

But the center of his universe was his wife, my Grandma Esther. They met in 1956 at a meeting of the Liverpool Jewish Graduates Society and were just about immediately inseparable, and were married the next year. Several years later, they moved with their first two children (my mum and her sister, Sally) to London, at which point they moved into the house they’d live in for the next sixty years. They loved that house. I did, too. Grandma kept a beautiful garden out back, and made excellent chicken soup, and taught herself to use a computer at some point in the 80s and loved it (she was probably even more clever than he was). Grandpa loved to read Winnie the Pooh to us in Latin (“Winnie Ille Pu”). He would tell incomprehensible jokes—incomprehensible because he’d start to laugh so hard that he could barely ever wheeze out a punch line. He loved to sing. And he would be delighted to sit in the living room, quiet, with a cup of tea, and with Grandma.

Before the Alzheimer’s could take it away from him, he wrote (i.e., dictated to Grandma, who typed—he credits her in the introduction as his “amanuensis” [an excellent word], his encouragement, and his guide) a history of the Roman Empire, including portraits of the first and second century emperors (plus forty of their military and literary contemporaries), and his own translation of Tacitus’ Germania, and an account of the origin of the peoples of Roman Britannia. We had it published and printed for him. It is very long.

I could write on and on about him, about them. Actually, Grandma Esther already wrote out a family history ten years ago, and it’s well over 100 pages, so most of what I could say and much more besides that has already been written, and with far drier wit than I could ever muster. Grandma died several years ago now, only letting herself go once she knew Grandpa would be safe and well cared-for. The two of them were a great love. They modeled love for me, just as my parents do. I think I look most like Grandma Esther. I think I feel most like Grandpa Murray.(…)