It’s taken me a year to find the words for this. One year ago I had no idea where to even begin. How could I possibly express how much my grandmother meant to me and to my family? How could I translate the complex emotions I felt after she died when I couldn’t even understand them myself? It felt like an insurmountable task. Now I understand why trying to find a point to begin was so difficult.
My sister and I sat at my grandmother’s grave last April and shared memories back and forth. The autumn sun touched our backs and the wind played with the ornaments that decorated her gravestone. We talked about her as though we could still feel her soft skin pressed against our cheeks as she gave us one of her classic hugs, the kind that made you feel overwhelmingly loved but a bit wet on the cheek afterwards. We talked about how we could still remember her hands in detail; the way they felt so soft to touch. Her grip was firm but comforting, reassuring, and reluctant to let go. Her hands never felt frail to me, no matter how much they aged or weathered, they were always gentle but tough. I felt safe in those hands.
Her hands were skilled and generous in many crafts like baking, knitting, playing the organ, and poaching an egg to perfection. Everybody who knew my grandmother knew to visit her with an appetite. To politely refuse food from the table she’d laid out would not only be rude but it would be embarrassingly futile. No guest would leave her house without a full stomach, she would damn well make sure of that. And just in case you hadn’t already eaten enough, she’d grab a treat from her cupboard to send you home with. It was also a known fact to practice caution with the salt shaker. Gran loved her salt and kept it in a large shaker with a rather free-flowing top. You wouldn’t so much shake it as you would tip it ever so gently onto its side. I loved the sound of my mother and grandmother chatting to one another at the table while drinking tea and coffee, with the ease of best friends. The strength of their bond was a steady source of comfort for me in an overwhelming and ever-changing world. Having not inherited Gran’s gift for small talk, I liked to entertain myself at the table by braiding the tassels on the edge of the table cloth, the one that felt so weighted and textured that it was more like a rug that had been repurposed. She would unintentionally entertain my younger sister and I when she’d say things like “I’ll crack you” when she threatened her cat for being naughty. Before we left she’d tell us off for trying to do the dishes and make us take home her women’s magazines – the ones she called “rubbish” but still kept buying and still kept trying to pass onto us.
Gran lived independently in her own home right up until her last several years of life, when she moved into my parents home and then briefly a rest home once she required professional care. I remember playing in her garden as a child, sticking my hands into the dense, fragrant shrub outside the front door, picking petals off the torch lilies with my sister and pretending they were cigarettes, and exploring the mysterious, cobweb-filled hothouse. As an adult, I remember walking up McFarlane Street and seeing her sitting in the sunroom, working on a crossword in a magazine. I’d bring in her mail and she’d always look so happy to see me. She would take any visit as an opportunity to catch up on everything she possibly could. I don’t think you could find a more welcoming host. She was so good at conversation that my husband would nickname our visits with her each year as “another episode of Gran TV”, because it felt like she was a talk show host and we were her guests. She asked many questions, was so quick to come up with the next one, and always seemed so interested and entertained by what we had to say. I don’t think she heard much of what I said, so Matt was a good intermediary between a nearly deaf elderly woman who loved to chat and her granddaughter who didn’t like to raise her voice and struggled with small talk.
It was no secret that Gran was ready to go. She’d made it past the mark of a century and she would shock everyone by joking at her birthday party about how she hoped it would be the last one. As much as I miss my grandmother, I can’t help but feel overwhelmingly grateful and at peace. After all, what more could I hope for than to see my grandmother live to the age of 101 looking as healthy as anyone could at that age and mentally sharp right up until the very end. It was an absolute gift for everyone who knew and loved her to be given so much time with her. If only we were afforded that same good fortune with everyone we love.
After her death I asked myself, at what stage in the grieving process am I? I honestly didn’t know. Because it felt like I’d been grieving her for the last five years at least. Every time I came home to visit I prepared myself for the fact that it might be my last time seeing her. I got so used to feeling the weight of that ‘last goodbye’ before I headed back to the other side of the world, mentally preparing myself for the inevitable and grieving preemptively. But every time I came home again she was still alive and well. So funnily enough, when the last time actually did come around, I had finally decided that she was invincible. It had been three years since I’d seen her because of my inability to travel during the pandemic, so I didn’t know what to expect. But she was as quick witted as ever and still appeared to be full of life. Exhausted, undoubtedly, but still with that same appetite for good food, good conversation, and the knowledge that her family was doing well in life. Her eyesight was failing at that point and she was blind in one eye, so she needed help with eating, amongst most other things. It was lunch time when I visited, so I spoon-fed her from her chair while she joked about how silly it is that people in their old age become like babies again. For a 101 year old woman, she looked good. Her own grandmother who had immigrated from Ireland lived to the age of 102, so I thought “I’ll see her again next year”. But I never did because she died just a few months later.
Sometimes the world feels so small, but when you are half a world away from your family while it feels like a pillar is crumbling beneath you, the distance feels greater than ever. I watched my family grieve from afar, struggling to process things while feeling disconnected and stranded. I stared at a hand written letter from my grandmother that she had mailed to me some years ago. In her elegant cursive hand-writing it said “You are so far away from us all and we do miss you terribly”. It never felt more piercingly true than in that moment.
Though it appeared to be an ending, I couldn’t convince myself of it, and it took me a year of reflection to figure out why. Though she is gone, it still feels like she is here. Not in a spiritual way, but in a dawning realization of how deeply she was woven into my life and my identity – and not only mine, but countless others. It doesn’t feel like an end, it instead feels like being at a different point on a circle, where everything contained within it is inextricably intertwined. That’s the way I’ve always felt about my grandmother; I imagined her as infinite. Not invincible, but infinite. After her death I was waiting for that feeling to change, but it never did. She’d laid out a tightly knit foundation for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and it still feels like her soft but firm hands are securely holding the threads of my family together.