Becoming a different kind of woman.
My nan was a tough woman. She’d escaped an unthinkably abusive early life in Yorkshire by running away to London, a horse and cart journey in those days. She found a job as a scullery maid in a posh house in Putney, eventually working her way up to the role of housekeeper. By the time the Second World War began she had married the boy who delivered the lemonade, and as the bombs dropped over London, they fled back up North. There they had three children and a good life of hard work running a little grocers’ shop. Her beloved lemonade boy, my Grandad, died before I was born and in her grief, my Nan travelled the world for a while finding casual work where she could - in Aukland, San Francisco, Honolulu, Melbourne, Singapore.
When her grandchildren began to arrive she came home. She was the light in my childhood. She taught me to count by playing Soldiers’ Rummy. She showed me how to Cha-cha-cha by putting my tiny bare feet on top of her fluffy slippers. She fed me with love and laughter and soft baked bread slathered in Stork SB. We understood each other, me and my Nan.
She outlived her second husband, even though he was twenty years her junior, and kept moving forwards with grit and a no-nonsense attitude that was too unyielding for some. Not for me. She was the camp old battle-axe that I aspired to be.
Nan was poorly.
When my mum phoned to say Nan was very poorly we were at Legoland, five hours drive away from her, having a weekend trip with our little son. Nan had been poorly for a while but fought her way back to business-as-usual time and again. We joked that she was like the Kathy Bates character in the film ‘Misery’ getting to the brink of death then rising again, full-throttle. We hoped this would be another one of those occasions but we weren’t going to risk it. We bundled our boy into the car and raced up the M1 to get to the hospital, my shoulders increasingly hardening with stress the nearer we were.
By the time we got there my Nan had died. Her death had been peaceful and calm with her children by her side. The nurse asked if I wanted to see her. Instinctively, it felt right to do so.
My husband and I entered the room. Neither of us had seen a dead person in real life before and didn’t know what to expect. She was there on the bed, neatly tucked in. Beautiful, porcelain, serene. The body on the bed looked exactly like my Nan, but it wasn’t my Nan any more. This sudden realisation was a shock, deeply confusing. My Nan had gone. My Nan was somewhere else. Where was she? The body on the bed was simply the vessel that had carried her. The outside shape that she lived in.
My Nan was the woman who shouted instructions at Big Daddy when Saturday afternoon wrestling was on the telly, who was both outraged and highly judgemental of the creases in Princess Diana’s wedding dress when she emerged from her golden carriage, who put on a comedy ‘old lady’ walk wherever there was promise of a pensioners’ discount even though she was well into her 90s. She was the music she played, the stories she told, the love she gave. Her body was just her transportation system.
Her final gift.
Seeing my Nan’s body, thinking about the core of who she was, who we all are, started my journey towards accepting my own body, my own vessel which carries the things that make me, me. That epiphany was my Nan’s final gift and as a result I have become a different kind of woman.