Marking time

[radegund]

Yesterday, it was ten years since my grandmother died. (This is my father's mother - my mother's mother is still going relatively strong.) She was a towering figure in my childhood. A rock-solid role model. She wrote books (more than 50 altogether - mainly children's adventure stories); she knitted; she made her own bread; she played the 'cello; she learnt Russian in her sixties and travelled all over the world. She was a strong, active, proud and intelligent woman, and she made the most of her life. She never stopped learning or being interested in people. She treated me, even when I was a very small child, as her equal. She was the most encouraging grandmother in the world - she really made me feel as though I was a marvellous person who could do anything.

In one of those silent-but-deadly family tragedies, my sister had a completely different experience of her. They clashed, perhaps because they were too alike, and my grandmother, who ought to have known better, treated my sister abominably for a while. There were circumstances (notably the death of my aunt) that might be described as mitigating if my sister had been an adult at the time, and not a nine-year-old child, but it was very ugly. It's only recently that I've come to understand the full extent of what happened, too, which makes it doubly shocking to me.

So my feelings about my grandmother are very complex. I miss her. I still have vivid dreams about her and (even more often) about her house, which was saturated with her presence. I wish she were still here. I wish she could have seen me emerge from the depression under which I laboured at the end of her life. I wish she could have met Niall. I wish she could have met her impending great-grandchild. And I also wish that she could have lived long enough to unpick some of the emotional tangles she left behind her.

In the summer of 1994 I was living in Paris, working in a hotel. On the morning of 19 July, the blackest thunderstorm I've ever seen burst over the city, pissing yellow streams of rain into the streets, cracking the sky open. We knew my grandmother wasn't going to last, so that day I went to work with my cousin, to show her how to cover for me while I was in Dublin for the funeral. There was no point in trying to stay dry: we were drenched the second we stepped outside the door. When we got to the hotel, the head waiter called me aside and said "votre grand-mère est décédée".

I started with numbness. It was a long time before I felt the loss.

Comments

[ainetl.livejournal.com]

your grandmother sounds like the most amazing person. isn't it strange how two people can have such different experiences with someone?

i think it's always sad for a parent to think that their child can't meet a relative that was important to them. perhaps you'll see aspect of them in your son or daughter, sometimes it's weird how these things work.