How can something so wonderful be so...

When Lucas was much younger (he just turned 10) and he'd sleep at our place, he'd sometimes ask me to sing him a lullaby when I put him to bed. He didn't ask often and I think it was just a bit of a delaying tactic, but whenever he asked I'd tell myself I'd have to spend a bit of time the next day thinking of some more, because I could only ever remember one song at the time.

I'd usually sing four lines from it and he'd be gone, which was good because I only knew two lines (and made one of them up) and repeated them twice. I don't know if I even had the tune right.

But I'd sing it and he'd drift off in that way that makes you marvel at how quickly a human being can go to sleep and wonder why we lose that ability. For as long as I can remember, it's been very rare for me to get to sleep within 30 or 40 minutes of turning the light off and laying down unless I'm devastatingly tired.

At some point I told Wendy I'd occasionally sing him this lullaby and when she asked me what it was and I spoke the words out a little bit, she looked horrified. I'm not going to say what it was, but it turned out I'd been using a horribly racist term and hadn't even known what it meant.

I suddenly imagined him in Show and Tell singing the lullaby his poppy sang him. Public primary schools are hotbeds of tolerance and inclusion nowadays (and rightly so) and we would have had Child Services on the doorstep as quickly as if he'd told someone we had him working down salt mines or there was porn playing on the TV all day.

But the thing is, every time I sang him that song I had a fleeting memory of a time (and there might have been others – we're talking around 45 years ago) of Frank singing it to me.

He might not have done so specifically when he was putting me to bed. I can't remember many times when he did even put me to bed – not because I don't think he did, just because almost all my memories of being the age where you need to be put to bed are long gone.

But that's the way memory works. Over the years memories get mixed up with other fragments and things are a little bit different every time we remember them. We get frustrated when we can't recall specifics about stuff but we're not really supposed to – we're not computers. A psychologist will tell you memory isn't meant to represent a perfect record, it's there to give you an emotional context for something or someone in your life.

And every time I sang that song to my grandson with the term that was obsolete before I was born (and with good reason), I could hear Dad singing it in my mind.

I don't know if Frank realised it was racist. Being an adult at the time I'm sure he did, and racism was a lot more accepted in his day. If he did know I'm sure he thought it was hilarious.

But the people we've lost live in our minds, warts and all, and even the warts become stuff we love them for.

Hard to believe, but he's been gone a little over four years. Miss you Dad...