How The Years Pass

I know I normally write about writing. Which is normal, I guess. Writing inspires, frustrates, clouds and expands my mind in equal measures, and those measures are doubles. But today, right out of the blue, my mind got distracted from thoughts about my wife, my baby girl or my writing, all of which vie for space in that Hampton Court maze.

I was busy, really busy. Rushing around, doing a million things at once, not even looking at the clock between hours. And then, all of a sudden, I went back three years. At the time, I thought it might be only two years, wasn’t sure if it was three or two, but then I thought that it simply couldn’t be two. I was back at my Nan’s bedside, holding her hand, feeling her paper-thin skin in my hand, not knowing what to say.

I’m known as someone who always has something to say; an opinion, a reaction, an idea (I hasten to add, not always something worth saying, but said it nonetheless is.) If I’m quiet, something is up. But the day my Nan died, I was stumped. It’s not a moment in one’s life that you can prepare for - saying goodbye to someone for the last time.

I think maybe my mind was triggered by the emotional and moving accounts of three wives whose husbands were killed in Afghanistan. None of them got the chance to say goodbye, but all three wanted to, it came through in their words. If you get a chance, listen again to it here, it’s just under an hour, but I promise you, five minutes and you’ll want to hear everything the three women have to say.

Anyway, back to the hospice, the empty room, the silence. I like silence most of the time, I spent six months talking for a job, I talk a lot. But not knowing what to say, I felt almost guilty. Like I was letting my Nan down. I am just by calling her that. She was never Nan, always Grandma, said grandly, but in a nice way. And there were a million stories, memories, reminiscences about her incredible life and the richness and jollity she brought to mine. Every game of cards we ever played when she visited she won. I’m not talking generically there, she won every single one. It was like she had a magnet. If she needed an ace, it found her. If you had two aces, she had three*. She once wrote me an account of her experiences in the war. It was to help me understand it, and then, in History class, I’d be ahead of the game. Well, I could hardly read it. Her writing was almost inscrutable. Perfectly legible to my Dad, whose own style has loops and curls that outwit but to my own young eyes, it took a lot of work to make sense of it. But eventually I did, and when I told her I enjoyed reading it - it was brilliant - she told me about a story she wrote when she was younger, called the Burrowers. It was about a group of animals who lived underground.

The silence was broken by a nurse who came in to change something, I forget what. I asked her whether my Grandma would wake up. None of the family who had been with me in the room until a few minutes earlier (rotation had been employed) had asked the question, I guess because we were all afraid of the answer, whichever way it was answered. I imagined the answer would be difficult to deliver, but the nurse kindly told me : No. Suddenly, I knew what to say, that made it easier somehow.

It’s not exactly three years, but today I missed my Grandma. She was a great woman.

*A harmless joke, Grandma.