"I really am ok!"
Approaching the three year anniversary of her death, my Nan is still often in my thoughts.
“I really am ok!”.
There was such sincerity and clarity in those words. And on her face too. She looked me directly in the eye when she said it. I could feel my own expression, a ridged knot, all my facial muscles tense, down into my neck and chest. My hands were clenched together. In that moment I knew that she could see all of that, the panic, the fear, the grief etched in the 45 years of forehead and cheeks and eyes she had kissed - ‘my girl’. It was not the words though, it was the eye to eye connection. In that moment there was calmness, a slowing down, a couple of seconds in a comforting bubble of solemnitude and honesty. It was a beautiful, wretched, experience, and I can't imagine a time when it won’t bring tears to my eyes.
My Nan was dying.
She was nearly 101, so I guess it was bound to happen sooner than later, but it still hurt more than I could have imagined.
In her last months she had bouts of mania that were hard to endure, but seemed so necessary to witness, too. On this day, less than a week before she left us, we had gathered as a family around her, as we had done as often as we could. She was electric, like all the life still inside was vying for attention, feeding off itself, chaos incarnate. She confused multiple timelines and people, but she was so animated and earnest about it all. There was actual cackling - raucous laughter on the verge of hysteria. She talked to people that weren’t in the room, people long since gone, or acquaintances and friends we had never heard of from her long, long life. To the point where we started to feel they may actually be there, we just couldn’t see them.
I watched all this in knots, knowing what was coming, understanding that this was part of the process, part of my Nan’s path to that clearing. It hurt because it felt so real.
Her voice was loud, her pitch high, and she even moved her hands around wildly, where movements had been much slower and more deliberate for months. Winding down. Today she was wound up. Today, the room was hard and tight, filled with our sorrow and her discord, the air thick with it. Today I was suffocating, all of it anathema to my need to be in control, to bridle any situation, to ensure calm and order and composure. I sat at the foot of her bed, and in amongst all of this mania she looked me directly in the eye and said, in her proper Nan voice, and only to me,
“I really am ok!”.
My Nan was born at the end of the first world war, lived through the Great Depression, another world war and innumerable other conflicts, stock market highs and lows. Fertility hardships, a beloved son born, and widowed suddenly, traumatically, too young. She cared for her mother and her disabled sister through their own long lives. She had the strength and resilience of a woman who has made a life through almost unbearable hardships, who knew what it was to have nothing, to make do, to mend, to lose everything and start again, to build a good life, hands in the dirt, and in the cooking pot, and the sewing machine, and in whatever mess life might hand you. She was creative and skilled at many, many things. She was so very intelligent, smart and sensible and practical to a fault. She was complicated and difficult, generous and deliberate. Vexatious. She could be cutting in her remarks, cool and cruel sometimes, but she could also express such depth of love with simple acts and words, though rarely the word ‘love’ itself. I shared a strong connection with her. It may have waxed and waned in my youth, but in my adulthood I felt a responsibility, an obligation to her - not out of burden, but out of respect, and a recognition of much of my own self in her. I wanted to be there, to be her granddaughter because I would never have my own. To care for her, to hold her hand, to listen to her tales, to see her through her final journey.
I loved to sit with her, even in the times that I really didn’t love it at all. I loved those lines on her face, the stories they told, emotions etched like record grooves. I loved those twisted old fingers, elegant still, though wizened like old branches. Those hands that helped me learn to swim, to paint, to sew, to cook. To cut up chokos for the boiler to make pickles. I loved her fascination with plants and flowers and clouds when we sat outside. I loved the way she would sit with a considered response before sharing it, staring to the middle distance, lips pursed, perhaps a slightly tilted slow nod of her head - and often twiddling her thumbs (something I picked up from her). I loved her curiosity, always her curiosity, her need to know more.
“I really am ok!”
In that moment, those words, that sincere face, those wise and bright and clear old eyes, she gave me permission to release that breath I was holding. She bade me let go of the fear and grief in my face and heart. She offered me a balm when I was at a loss to give her one myself, and in that moment now inscribed on my heart I loved her even more. It was a gift. She knew she was leaving, and she needed me to know it was all right, even when it didn’t look like it from the outside.
Though we spent all the time we could with her in her last days, she chose to pass in the early hours of the morning, after we had gone home past midnight for a couple of hours of sleep. I think she did that on purpose, it was her way. She was fiercely independent to the end. My heart broke that I couldn’t be there with her at that most precious, permanent moment, though I am honoured I got to spend so much of the time of liminality with her. The grief was profound, but I held so tight to those four words, for her.
And also for me.
I really am ok.
This is really lovely x