Prompt: a grandpa who’s memory sharpens with age

The slow burn of morning gazed in through the window of the front room and Frank sat there in his familiar chair staring at the wall, thinking hard to himself and the late April sun was making its way up high into the sky. But Frank sat still, almost paralysed and within himself as his thoughts took hold.
Each day was anew for Frank, each memory an earlier experience from somewhere in his life. It was as if time was making its way back to the beginning, the Benjamin Button syndrome was setting in, only it wasn’t physical.
His chair rocked back and forth as he pondered those early experiences. Frank couldn’t believe what he was remembering. Early memories of himself and his brother and himself making sandcastles on the beach and those hated school essays he was forced to finish or fear facing the ruler to the back of his hand. And then the sudden thought of war sprung back into his brain.
Frank was 18, stuck out in southern France in the mud awaiting the inevitable, trembling head to toe and clutching onto his tin helmet, which only slightly poked over the trench. Gunshots were going off all around him, and Frank flinched at every one of them, paralysed in fear.
He cried a little in his chair as it rocked, as the memories came back to him and took a hold of his brain. It was all he could do to stop himself fainting and giving up on it all there and then. He flashed forward.
It was Frank’s wedding day. His closest friends and family stood outside that majestic church and threw confetti over himself and Barb as they pranced hand-in-hand out the doors and down the steps towards their ride out of town. He carefully guided his new wife into the vehicle and clambered in after her, falling onto her lap as he did so. They drove off into the sunset together.
He returned to his chair and studied the crisp morning light as it leaked into his living room. The light bounced through his tatty old curtains and created clever patterns on the wall. Barb re-entered his mind once more, this time in despair in the hospital. Frank stood silently beside her awaiting the inevitable, his hands raised above his head as he dropped to his knees and witnessed the final whisper of breath leave his diseased wife’s body. All lost and forgotten. All remembered at once.
But Frank didn’t want to remember. He’d locked those truths away in deep crevasses of his mind, unable and unwilling to let himself face the honesty of life. What was it that desperately wanted to escape? Why had it chosen this morning of all mornings to come back and cause pain? At 73, he was facing more than he could handle, and the death of his daughter was one more memory awaiting Frank, one that would take him for good.
