“Collecting for Marie Curie would make my grandad proud”

My grandad was quite an old-timey bloke; liked a good joke and had quite an air about him. When he was in the pub with his friends he wouldn’t speak much, but you’d always know he was there.

My biggest memory from childhood is coming home after primary school to find he’d stolen the TV remote. He’d also move a chair from the dining table into the middle of the carpet, so even if you sat on the sofa, you couldn’t see the telly – and he’d have his snooker on. An absolute old menace, he was!

My grandad was diagnosed with stage four melanoma. When he went to have it removed, it turned out the cancer had spread to his brain. From there, it was a decline that kept going until he ended up in the Marie Curie Hospice, Cardiff and the Vale.

Dignity was the main thing Grandad was worried about at the end. Right now, there aren’t enough funds or resources to let people die with dignity anymore, so to have that care in the hospice and see the way that they treated him was just fab.

We couldn't avoid it, he was going away. His eyes were not the same anymore and his cheeks were sallow, but you could also see how impeccably they took care of him, because he still looked like him. There was a lot of comfort in that.

Everyone at this hospice just loved my grandad. They seemed so familiar with him that it felt very safe to leave him there when we had to go home at the end of the day.

After Grandad died, my sister and I went back to the hospice. A nurse recognised us and came running out from behind the reception desk. She was quite visibly upset and said, “We just miss him so much!”

Looking back on it, the hospice doesn’t even feel like a miserable place, which is so strange. It feels almost happy, because it’s a place you can go and feel the love for the person that you’re about to lose. And afterwards, when you’re sad and you’re grieving, you know that if you ever went there again or you wanted to volunteer, you’d be welcomed back. That’s very, very comforting in those difficult times.

I’m pretty sure we collected for Marie Curie at the funeral. I know for certain that everyone wore Marie Curie daffodils. My sister and I wore yellow as an homage.

The first proper collection I volunteered for was the Great Daffodil Appeal. I enjoy collecting because you’re giving back to the people who gave you so much in the first place. You see that recognition of Marie Curie as a charity. Somebody walks past, and you see them do a bit of a double take. They see the big yellow hat, and they think “Oh my God, that’s Marie Curie!” and they come rushing over.

I’m helping by collecting, you’re helping by donating. We’re both completely different people, probably from different walks of life, but we, in this very moment, have a mutual goal, which is just to get more money for Marie Curie so they can help more people at the end.

After I collect, I always think, ‘I did something and my Babo – what we called my grandad – would be so proud of that because he cared about Marie Curie so much.’

And the reward is helping an organisation that is trying to give people the most dignity possible through the worst time possible. On a recent collection shift, there was this one little kid that came up with the £2 coin and I said, “Thank you so much, would you like a daffodil?” And he went, “No, I just want to help.” It’s a little bit of brightness around a dark situation.

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