The Chronicles of Suntwe - Chapter 7: The Man Who Taught Me Love

The Man in his Prime

The day my world shifted began like any other. I was fourteen, in the middle of my ZJC exams at Christian Brothers College. The morning sunlight came through the curtains in that gentle way it sometimes does, touching everything with a softness you only recognise later as a goodbye.

I walked into Gramps’s room before school, the air inside carrying its familiar blend of old tobacco, warm fabric, and the faint sweetness of shaving soap. He was already awake, sitting up in bed, listening to the muffled crackle of the wireless that had been the soundtrack of our lives together. I leaned in to give him a hug and felt his arm wrap around me with that quiet strength he never announced, never explained, simply offered.

“Go on, my boy,” he said, his voice steady with affection. “Knock them dead.”

I did not know that would be the last time I heard him speak.The thing about last times is that they never arrive with any ceremony. They pass through your fingers as if you are supposed to hold them without knowing you are holding them. Only later do you realise they were sacred.

After the exam, a friend’s mother decided to drop us at the cinema. The Matrix had just been released, and we sat in the dark watching worlds fold and break and reform in impossible ways. I remember thinking the film felt profound, though at fourteen I did not really understand why. It was as if my mind already sensed that my own reality was in the middle of reassembly.

When the movie ended, she drove us home. I told her not to ring the gate bell and said I would jump the wall instead. At that age it felt like a small act of independence, but years later I would come to believe it was something deeper, something instinctive, an unspoken refusal to shatter the stillness waiting on the other side of that wall.

I swung my leg over, dropped into the driveway, and saw the cars.Not lined neatly the way guests park at a happy home, but clustered, heavy, unmoving. There is a hush that falls over a place where death has just visited. Even the air seems to know.

In the silence between one breath and the next, I understood.The knowledge did not come as a thought or a guess. It arrived whole and complete, as if it had been travelling toward me for years and had finally reached its destination.

My mother came rushing out of the house, her face weighed down by the burden of words she did not want to speak. She stopped in front of me and whispered, “I need to tell you something, my boy.”

“I know, Mum,” I said quietly. “He is gone.”

I did not shed a tear. Not because I did not love him, but because I had spent so many nights grieving him long before he died. As a child I often cried myself to sleep terrified that he would be gone by morning. At restaurants, when a song played that he and I used to listen to on the wireless, tears would stream down my face before I even understood why. There was never trauma in those tears. Only love so deep it already understood the cost of holding something fragile.

My mother tried to stop me from going to his room. She wanted to protect me from the image of him lying still, but there are moments in life you cannot be shielded from. I stepped past her and walked slowly up the stairs.

His room felt different. A silence lived there now. His wireless, always alive with sport commentary and static, was finally quiet. His retirement watch sat unwound on the table beside the bed. The man who had been the centre of so many of my days now lay motionless, and yet his presence felt larger in that moment than it ever had in life.

I stood beside him and said goodbye in the only way a boy knows how. I let the finality of it settle into me without tears, without panic, only a strange and absolute calm. At fourteen I did not yet understand that this was the end of my childhood. I only understood that something warm and steady had disappeared from the world.

What I did not know then was that everything he had poured into me had already taken root.

Gramps was born Henry Harvey Collins in 1906 in Mutare to Scottish parents. He became a carpenter, a cabinet maker on the National Railways of Zimbabwe. His hands built things that lasted. His heart did too.

He entered my life not through blood but through kindness. He had originally been my father’s father-in-law from a first marriage. Years after that marriage ended, my parents went to see him at a hotel on Lobengula Street where he was living in lonely conditions no elderly man should endure. My mother, who has always been guided by compassion rather than obligation, took one look at the room and said, “Pack your bags. You’re coming home with us.”

It was a decision that revealed her nature completely. Without hesitation she adopted the father of her husband’s ex wife out of pure humanity. And so, Gramps came home and lived with us for twenty five years.

By the time I was born he was already seventy nine, but age did not blunt his spirit. He became my best friend. My confidant. My mentor. My partner in mischief. He was safety and play and tenderness all woven into one person.

He made two wooden puzzles when he was eighteen, back in the days when his hands were young and precise. I spent countless hours on his bedroom floor turning those puzzles over in my fingers while he listened to cricket or rugby commentary on the wireless. The deep crackling voice of the broadcasters blended with the scent of tobacco on his shirt, creating a soundscape and smell that still sits inside me like a memory that refuses to fade. Those puzzles shaped me. They trained my mind to see patterns, to approach problems differently. They still sit with me today, worn by the touch of generations.

He also taught me things that were entirely inappropriate for a boy my age which made them all the more special. His version of Mary had a little lamb became sacred scripture in my young mind. When I recited his version at preschool with complete conviction, my teacher was horrified. I was completely bewildered. Gramps found the entire situation hilarious.

He loved sport and followed it with the devotion of a man who had lived long enough to see heroes rise and fall. Rugby, cricket, hockey. If it was on the wireless, he was listening. That sound became the heartbeat of our house.

My favourite memories are from the mornings when he would let me shave alongside him. He would lather his face with a brush made of otter fur and then dab the foam across my tiny cheeks until I was covered in white foam. He would hand me a razor with no blade and together we would stand before the mirror, rinsing our razors dramatically in the basin like two men preparing for the day. As his eyesight faded from shingles, I reversed the ritual. I would sit him down and shave him gently with his electric razor. It was my first experience of caring for another person with real tenderness.

When we went on holiday, I would always bring him back toffees and he would always let me eat most of them. When his eyes became too weak for reading, he would ask me to read Shakespeare to him. I understood nothing of the language but understood everything of the love behind those evenings. The words did not matter. The moments did.

There is a smell of tobacco on old shirts that still unravels me. It was the smell of safety. The smell of being held without asking. The smell of the first man who taught me that love is not something loud or dramatic. It is something steady and certain.

Time eventually took its toll. His vision faded. His body weakened. His world grew smaller. Mine grew larger. And somewhere in the overlap I learned what it meant to love someone enough to care for them in their decline.

In hindsight, his passing changed me more than I understood at the time. Something gentle closed its eyes in me that day. I became a little more cautious with my heart. A little more aware of how fragile love can be. It was the first time I understood that the world does not guarantee anything, not even the people who feel like the foundations of our lives.

The one wound that stayed with me was being kept from his funeral because of school exams. Those exams were never marked. Our entire year was never recorded. It still feels like an injustice, though not towards me. Towards him. He deserved my presence at his final goodbye.

And yet his real legacy never lived in ceremonies or gravestones. It lived in the ways he shaped me. In my curiosity. In my sense of justice. In my refusal to conform. In my tenderness. In the resilience he taught me without ever naming it. In the way I love my sons today with the same quiet, unwavering love he gave me.

I often imagine what he would think if he could see me now. I believe he would see the values he planted still alive and thriving. I believe he would laugh at the adventures I have had and revel in the stories they brought. I believe he would be proud of the way I still allow myself to be soft in a world that often demands hardness. I believe he would see himself in me.

I wish my sons could have known him. I wish they could have felt the warmth of his laugh, the safety of his presence, the joy he carried even in the final years of his life. But in my own way, I carry him forward to them. In my love. In my curiosity. In my courage to live differently.

If I could speak to him now, I would tell him the words that sit heavy at the centre of my chest.

Thank you.

Thank you for being the benchmark of truly unconditional love in my life.

Thank you for being a man any man would aspire to be.

Thank you for the love you gave, the lessons you taught, and the tenderness you fostered in me.

I can only hope that one day I will be able to hug you again.

The only picture I have of us together

Reflection

There are people who enter our lives by blood, and people who enter by choice, and sometimes the ones who arrive through the smallest door end up shaping us the most. Gramps was not bound to me through lineage, but through love that asked for nothing and gave everything. In a world where so much is loud and hurried, he lived in the quiet spaces. He taught me that strength can be gentle, that wisdom can be playful, and that love does not need to announce itself to be felt in every corner of a home.

Losing him did not break me in the way sudden grief often does. Instead, it marked me in a quieter way. It left an emptiness that only made sense years later when I began to notice the parts of me that existed because of him. The curiosity he encouraged. The tenderness he nurtured. The sense of justice. The loyalty. The willingness to sit with another person’s pain without needing to fix it. All of these things were gifts from a man who simply lived by example.

For a long time I carried regret about the funeral I never attended. It felt like a missing page in a story that deserved a proper ending. But as I grew older I realised that the real funeral had been held in the countless moments we shared. In the shaving rituals. In the Shakespeare evenings. In the puzzles worn smooth by our hands. In the quiet afternoons listening to his wireless crackle through the house. Those moments were the true goodbyes, given long before I knew I would need them.

I have carried him into every chapter of my life since he left. Into the father I am. Into the man I became. Into the way I love. Into the way I forgive. Into the way I stand up for people who need a defender. He is there in the gentleness that still survives in me despite the scars. He is there in the innocence I refuse to surrender even when the world tries to take it. He is there in the part of me that still believes in kindness for its own sake.

Sometimes I imagine what he would say if he could see my sons. I imagine him smiling at their mischief. I imagine him telling them the wrong nursery rhymes. I imagine him reading to them in that soft voice that turned stories into something more than words. They will never know him in the way I did, but they will know the best of him through the best of me. That is how love outlives death. That is how men like Gramps remain alive long after their last breath.

There is a kind of grief that never asks to leave. It settles into the corners of your soul and becomes part of the architecture of who you are. It is not a wound, and it is not a burden. It is a quiet companion that reminds you that you were loved deeply once, and that you are capable of loving deeply still.

Gramps taught me that a life does not need to be loud to be extraordinary. Sometimes the greatest men are the ones the world overlooks. The ones whose legacy is not in achievements but in the hearts they shaped without fanfare.

I am who I am because of him. And for that, I will always be grateful.

Victoria Falls..... a place we both loved but never saw together