45 Get Well Soon Messages for Grandpa (Tell Him What Has Been Handled)

The list nobody knew about

An illness stops a queue of work that nobody else in the family was tracking. He is flat on his back with a cannula taped to his hand, and out there somewhere is a car with a tax reminder on the mat, a boiler that wants topping up in October, an allotment going over, and a man at a window on Tuesday morning wondering where his lift has got to.

That is the anxiety in the bed. Not mortality. Jobs. Ray asked my mother three questions in his first week and every one of them was about somebody else's house.

So the card has two moves, and both are practical. The first is to report a job as done. Not offered, not planned. Done, past tense, finished with. Anything I can do, just say the word puts the work straight back on him: he now has to think of something, ask for it, and be grateful. He will not. He will say he is fine, and the card will have achieved nothing. I have cut the hedge back and taken the clippings to the tip is a card.

The second is to put a question in front of him that only he can answer. Not how are you feeling. Something out of the archive he has carried in his head for fifty years and never wrote down: which of the two keys on the ring does the back gate, what he put on the shed roof in 2011 and where he got it, how long the runner beans want in before you thin them. He is the only copy of that information and the whole family has been running on it for decades without noticing. Being consulted is a different experience from being visited. Visited, he is a subject. Consulted, he is briefly the thing the family runs on again, which is what he was on the Monday before all this, and he does not have to be well to do it. One rule on that and I mean it: the question has to be real. If you could find the answer on your phone in four minutes, do not ask him. He will know, and a made-up job is more insulting than no card.

He has never been much good at being visited

My grandfather has never once telephoned me to talk. He has telephoned me about a trailer, about a man who owed him money, and once at twenty past six in the morning to say the number I gave him for the vet was the wrong number. Contact, for him, arrives attached to a task. That is not coldness. It is just how men of that sort did it, and it worked perfectly well for eighty years, right up until the week he had nothing to carry.

Which is why the visits go badly. You sit down at ten past two, you ask how he is, he says not too bad, and then the pair of you are stranded in a chair-and-bed arrangement with no job between you and thirty-five minutes left on the parking. He is embarrassed by the fuss. You can hear yourself being bright and you hate it.

A card is easier for him than a conversation, and not for the reason people usually give. It is easier because it is a thing. It arrives, it can be picked up and put down, and it can be handed sideways to the man in the next bed. I once watched an eighty-four-year-old pass a card to a total stranger rather than say one word out loud about his own daughter. The card did the talking and he got to stand behind it.

A fall, or a broken hip

A fall is where the handing-over starts and everybody knows it. He goes down on a step he has used since 1974, and inside a fortnight there are conversations he is not part of about downstairs toilets and whether he should still have the car. Do not gesture at any of that, however kindly. And do not write get well soon and then leave a gap underneath it, because he will fill the gap in himself and not with anything good.

Give him an inventory instead. Two or three things already done, past tense, plus one date you will turn up. That is the whole card. He is doing arithmetic in that bed about how long the world runs without him, and an inventory is the only thing that answers the question he is actually asking.

• Grandad, the car is taxed until March and I have run it round the block twice so it does not sulk. Back Sunday.
• Hip mended, everything else on hold. Nothing here has gone wrong and nothing here is going to.
• I have been up to yours. Post is on the table, heating is on the low setting, and that tap you were on about is still doing it.
• Six weeks, they reckon. I am telling you the number now so you can start arguing with it early.
• Keith knows. I rang him myself. He says to tell you Tuesday can wait and to stop worrying about Tuesday.

Heart surgery, a stent, a bypass

A stent is in and out in two days and a bypass is not, but they produce the same card, because the frightening part of both is identical. A heart is not a knee. He has spent his life treating his own body as a tool that either works or wants a bit of oil, and now there is a printed sheet telling him what he is allowed to lift.

The weight limit is the thing to write about, and I am serious about that. A man told not to lift more than a bag of sugar for six weeks has been told his usefulness is suspended, which is worse news to him than the surgery was. So take the lifting off him out loud, and not as an offer. As something already settled. He will also be handed a rehab programme in a plastic folder and will treat it as homework set by a stranger, so do not police it. Attach it to a job. My uncle got his father walking again by asking him to come and pace out a fence line, which took twenty minutes and needed doing anyway. Get well messages after surgery covers the wider timing.

• The compost is turned. I did it wrong, Colin watched me do it wrong, and neither of us is sorry.
• Grandad, there is a limit on what you can lift and I am the limit now. Point at things. I will carry them.
• They have finished with you and now it is six weeks of sitting down. I have taken the long ladder home, so do not go looking for it.
• Whatever the folder from the rehab nurse says, do it. Saturday I will come and walk the fence line with you and we can both pretend it needed doing.
• Forty years of telling me to look after machinery properly, and here we are. Do as you are told for once.

A stroke, and what happens to the questions

Everything above assumes he can answer you. A stroke is where that stops being true, and it is the card on this list that goes wrong most often, usually out of straightforward fright.

Start with what is probably intact. In a great many strokes the understanding survives better than the speech does. He may not get the word out, or the word that comes out may be the wrong one entirely, and none of that tells you what went in. Assume he is following every syllable spoken in that bay. Families forget this within about a day. Somebody will stand at the end of the bed and say he is not really with us, at ordinary volume, in front of him.

That is what the card is for. It is the one object in the room addressed to him in the second person, when everything else within his hearing is about him in the third. It sits on the locker with his name on it, it stays after the visitors have gone, and it is the only thing in that bay that does not need him to produce speech in order to receive it.

The two moves at the top of this piece come apart here. Reporting still works and works better than ever. Consulting does not. He may be the only person alive who knows how the water is switched back on, he may no longer be able to tell you, and a card asking him will sit there being a test he cannot pass while somebody reads it aloud to him. So do not ask. Not gently, not as a joke. Find the answer somewhere else and never say where you got it.

There is one exception and it is worth the risk. If the speech has gone but he can nod, or point, or squeeze a hand, write him a question he can answer with a yes. A real one. A decision that is genuinely his: oak or larch for the fence, whether the man at the garage keeps the car or sells it, whether he wants the dog brought up. Somebody in that family is about to start making his decisions for him, and every week you can put that off is worth more than any sentence of comfort I know of.

Keep the sentences short and one idea long, not because he is diminished but because reading is exhausting for months afterwards and a solid paragraph reads as a wall. Write big and write dark. There is very often a visual field problem nobody has thought to mention to you.

My grandfather's brother had a stroke in the March of the year I turned thirty. He got about nine words back over the following two years and one of them, unhelpfully, was no. He used it for everything, including yes, and his wife could tell which was which by about the second month. I remember thinking that the information was all still in there. It just could not get out through the usual door.

• Grandad, it is me. There is nothing in this card you have to answer. It is just the news from home, and you can shut your eyes halfway through if you want.
• The car is on the drive where you left it and nobody is touching it without asking you first.
• Oak or larch for the fence. Squeeze once for oak. I will come Thursday and you can tell me then.
• You understand every word of this. I know you do, Mum knows you do, and anybody who talks over you in that room is going to hear about it from me.
• Nothing has been decided. Nothing is going to be decided without you in the room.
• No hurry on any of it. There is nobody waiting on you for anything, and I have checked.

A hospital stay, and the ward

He has not been outdoors in a fortnight and could not tell you what the weather has been doing, which is a strange thing to lose for a man who spent sixty years planning his week around it. So send him conditions. Not family news exactly. The state of the roads, what the wind did on Thursday, whether the field at the back has been cut and how badly, the price of diesel, whether the river came up.

• Grandad, it has rained every day since Tuesday and the bottom of the garden is a swamp. Thought you would rather know than guess.
• Day six. The roads were terrible coming over and the bypass is still shut, in case you were wondering. You usually are.
• From your grandson. Nothing needs doing, nobody needs ringing, and there is not one thing on that table with your name on it.
• They have finally cut the field behind ours. Late, badly, and in the wet. You would have had something to say about it.

A long condition, and when get well soon is the wrong phrase

Heart failure, COPD, Parkinson's, a cancer with a name and no date attached. Get well soon is not merely inaccurate on those cards. It hands him one more piece of work. He has spent sixty years delivering what was asked of him, and now a card asks him for a recovery, which is the one job he cannot deliver. He will read it as a job regardless, because that is how he reads everything.

Take the wish off and put things he already did in its place, past tense, finished. Not a tribute. Tributes read like an early draft of a eulogy and he will spot it in the first line. Specific, closed and small: the fence he put in that has not moved, the day he drove four hours for somebody and came home the same night. What to write to someone with a serious illness goes further into that register.

And here is where I go against myself. At the top I said never leave a job undone to make him feel needed, and I stand by that, because most of the time it is a performance he can see through from the doorway. I have also deliberately left a shed lock broken for a fortnight and told him so on a card, because there was nothing else left in the world with his name on it, and a man with no outstanding work is a man everybody has finished with. Both of those cards went to the same person inside one month. I could not tell you now which one he needed, and I have stopped expecting to work it out in advance.

• That fence you put in twenty years ago has not moved an inch. I went and checked it on Sunday, on purpose, so I could tell you.
• Grandad, the shed lock is still broken. I am not fixing it until you tell me which way round the barrel goes, and I can wait.
• The beans are in and already going over, which I know is my fault and not the weather's. Tell me what I did.
• I am not going to dress this up. Thursday at four, and I will bring the accounts so you can tell me what I have got wrong.
• The allotment is dug over and I did the far end as well. That is all I have got this month. It will have to do.

Dementia

"Has anybody been up to see about that gate?"

He asked me that four separate times in one afternoon and all four times it was a fair question, because the gate had needed doing since 2019. This is the part nobody warns you about. The job list is very often the last thing standing. Names go, the year goes, the fact that you visited on Sunday goes, and the outstanding work stays exactly where it was, filed somewhere that has not come apart yet.

So write to the work. The gate is done, I used the long screws, it does not drop any more. That reaches him when a card about your daughter's exam results cannot, because the gate has sat in his head for six years and your daughter's exams happened last month. Answer the question he keeps asking, knowing he will ask it again on Thursday, and answer it on paper so somebody can point at the answer.

There is a version of this that families avoid because it feels like lying, and it is not lying. If he believes he still has a yard to lock up, tell him it is locked. Nobody is being deceived about anything that matters. A man is being told his work is finished, which it is, in every sense of the word.

• Grandad, the gate is done. Long screws, new hinge, it does not drop. That is one off the list.
• It is me, your grandson. Everything at yours is shut up and locked and there is nothing outstanding.
• The yard is secure. I checked it myself last night.
• You are the only person who ever showed me how to bleed a radiator, and I have done every one in this house since. That one is yours.

From a young grandchild

A seven-year-old writing to her grandfather has one enormous advantage over every adult in the family, which is that nobody has told her the situation is delicate. She will write about swimming, at length, including the bit about the goggles. Let her, and do not tidy it up on the way past. If you want to steer at all, steer toward the thing the child associates with him rather than toward the illness. Nearly every child has one: the shed, the van, the dog, the drawer with the odd screws in it, the trick he does with a coin. That is the sentence worth getting onto the card, because he will read it as evidence that a piece of him has already gone somewhere safe.

• Get well soon Grandad. I can do a whole length of the pool now without stopping once.
• I want to come to your shed. Mum says when you are better. Are you better yet.
• Grandad the dog is fine. He was sick on the stairs but he is fine.
• Please get better because nobody else can do the coin thing.

From an adult grandchild, a long way off

From three hundred miles the first instinct is to say sorry for not being there. All that does is put a man in a hospital bed in the position of having to tell you it is fine, which is a task, and he is not taking on tasks at the moment.

Send a date and a job instead. Dates travel. So do the jobs you can do from where you are, and there are more of those than people think: ringing the council, chasing the garage, arguing with an insurer, finding out what the man who does the chimney is called these days. My cousin Colin won a fourteen-month insurance argument for our grandfather from Rugby, entirely by telephone, and put one line about it in a card. That line did more than three visits had.

• Grandad, the insurance is sorted. Fourteen months and I have won. I will bring the letter up on the 22nd so you can read it properly.
• I am three hundred miles away and useless in person, so I have been useful on the telephone instead. The council have finally been out.
• I am up on the 9th for a week, and I have already told the garage I am coming, so there is a job waiting. You can supervise.
• Sunday nights, seven o clock, from now on. You can put the phone down after four minutes and I will not take it personally.

From a great-grandchild

A great-grandchild's card does a piece of arithmetic for him that nothing else in the room can manage. He is looking at a felt-tip scribble made by somebody who will still be here in 2090, and whatever else went wrong that week, that particular sum comes out in his favour. Take dictation and do not improve it. Write the words down exactly as the child says them, including the bit that makes no sense, then let them put their own name on it, badly. If the child shares his surname, get the surname on there.

• Nathan says to tell you he has a digger, it is yellow, and it is at his house. He was very firm about the last part.
• To Great Grandad. From Ivy. She has drawn your van. The wheels are the round bits at the top.
• Get well soon Great Grandad, love from Nathan Whitaker, which is your name as well.

Two-line entries, for the card that goes round

By the sixth signature a family card has usually turned into a wall of get well soon. Carve the jobs up before it leaves the house. Somebody has the garden, somebody has the car, somebody has the neighbours, somebody has whatever the grandchildren are up to. And sign it so he knows who you are, because a man in his late eighties has a lot of grandchildren and half of them have changed surname since he last wrote a Christmas card. If the wider family is signing too, get well messages for a family member sorts lines by relation.

• Grandad. Everything shut, everything locked, nothing owing. From all of us.
• Car started first time. Love from Colin.
• Hedge is down to the fence posts. Sorry about the shape of it.
• Thinking of you, Grandad. The lawn is done and I did the edges as well.
• Get well soon. Love from Louise, the tall one.

Turn it into a group card

A grandfather's signing list is long and geographically stupid. Four households, a brother who does not drive any more, a great-grandchild who cannot hold a pen, two cousins abroad, and one paper card that leaves my aunt's house on a Monday and has picked up its second signature by Friday week.

A get well ecard everyone signs online takes the geography out of it. Put the link in the family chat and let people write their bit whenever they get to it. Anyone who freezes at the empty box can crib from get well soon messages. You can create a card online in a few minutes and print the thing off for his locker if he would rather hold paper, which a lot of them would. Leave it open afterwards. Week five is when the post stops and the illness does not. If it is your grandmother rather than your grandfather, get well soon messages for grandma is a different card with a different problem inside it.

Before you send, ring the ward and ask what time he is awake and on his own. On most of them the answer is somewhere around six in the morning, hours before anybody visits, and that is the longest part of his day.