The last exhale (farewell Nan)

Tags

Can’t catch my breath, death, Enter your zip code here, farewell, funeral, Grief, No more a grandchild, no more grandparents, tea parties

Can’t catch my breath, the wheel is turning; my station on the totem pole changing before my eyes. Not for anything I’ve done, but rather a birthright.

I am now the next eldest generation. No more a grandchild, for all the grandparents are gone.

She passed this morning, my maternal grandmother. Before we had a chance to say goodbye since my Prick Uncle didn’t see fit to warn us sufficiently, even though he saw her on Saturday (bad family blood never really helps in the end).

We could’ve been there yesterday, had we known. But we didn’t.

Now I’m no longer a grandchild. Only one generation left older than me.

And I can’t catch my breath, no air in my lungs where I mean it to be. That last exhale where she finally slipped the last veil of this life, that’s where my lungs are at. Emptied in shock and not filling up again (not yet) no matter how many swigs of O2 I take.

My lungs are empty, like hers are, and I didn’t get to say goodbye before she was gone.

She wasn’t perfect but she was my Nan.

And, she was my grandfather’s keeper, with his suppressed PTSD and life-long alcohol-themed self-medication. A milliner, a marvellous baker of deliciousness (including homemade fig and apricot jam) and in her senior years, an adventurous solo traveller with her senior citizens group.

I learned to tie shoelaces in her lounge room, in my knitted slippers with their knitted laces. There were tea parties with proper English China and biscuits on matching side plates. She made for my sister and me, matching toy clowns with their spaghetti-like arms and legs, and embroidered faces.

Growing up, she was a wonderful Nan. She gave us love.

But she was also mean-hearted, jealous and bigoted. It was only later I learned of her involvement in the forced adoption of my half-brother and it’s something I’ve never been able to entirely reconcile.

A wonderful grandmother. A terrible mother.

A troubled soul whose own benign shop front faltered as dementia kept up its relentless advance. More, we saw the bitterness and meanness my mother always said was there.

Finally we understood how it was for my mother who, to her own credit, never poisoned us against her: we had a relationship with my Nan despite my mother’s own troubled connection.

It was that ever-growing meanness in the end which kept me away. That, and Prick Uncle moving her to the opposite side of town, closer to him, but nowhere I could get to easily or often without a car.

There’s no point in making myself feel bad about that now. She’s gone. But the Nan I knew has been gone for many years now, really.

Yet… that final goodbye. That chance to share love and connection and let her know we were there? Taken from us through a sibling feud older than I am.

Now, I’m a grandchild no more. I’ll see her again I guess, on the day we bury her. Cold and small, the essential spark gone from her flesh. I’ll be able to tell her then as I’m telling her now that despite her flaws, and her apparently shoddy parenting, she was a good grandma.

And in the end, she got her wish to go peacefully and in her sleep. She lived probably fifteen years longer than she really wanted to, but it was only the last five of that she wasn’t really there.

Farewell Nan. Complicated lady, bearing both spikes and sweetness. Farewell, woman who was cold-hearted enough to give up her first grandchild on behalf of her own daughter. Farewell, maker of Peach Melba and Christmas Plum Pudding (with silver pennies inside) and homemade brandy custard.

May you have a fortunate rebirth, Nan. With lessons and learnings that bring you awakenings and ever-closer to your Essence Nature.

~Svasti

xxx

Un-caffeinated

Tags

AFL grand final, ancestral burial ground, Care Bear, coffee habit, cold turkey, cremation, funeral, graveside service, green tea, Mantra, tombstones

The funeral was nicer than I expected. For one thing, the wild wind, rain and hail held off til later in the day (just in time for the AFL grand final, hehe!).

Sure it was cold, and definitely surreal. I’ve never been to a graveside service before… and the cemetery itself was weird.

Sort of a bad clash between the old and the new, what with 70’s style concrete graves, modern standardised tombstones towering over others, with their gold lettering on black stone, all looking the same except for the family name emblazoned at the front. And everything from Greek Orthodox to Catholic, Presbyterian and Church of England graves. All hanging out next to each other rather peacefully, in a way they probably wouldn’t if still alive.

And hey, little did I know that several generations of my maternal family line are buried there, including my grandfather, great-grandparents, great aunt and uncle and several others. A modern ancestral burial ground. Go figure.

Have to say, while holding my mantra and cuddling my niece, I was thinking how glad I am that my post-life plans are for cremation. All this space taken up by the deceased and expensive monuments to the past… just doesn’t work for my sensibilities.

Also, more people showed than we expected. Some of Margaret’s fellow housemates and carers turned up. My parents, sister, brother-in-law, nieces, my paternal uncle, and get this, the Yeti (aka my rarely seen brother)… okay, he did skedaddle before the service ended but hey, it’s a show up.

I couldn’t find a nice enough looking toy cat, so I’d bought a little purple Care Bear finger puppet. My niece and I placed the bear amongst several wreaths that would eventually cover Margaret’s coffin which, for the service, hovered over the open grave containing her parents – she’d outlived them both by a good ten years or so.

Mum gave a lovely eulogy for Margaret, reminding us all of her playful nature, so it was in the end, a good service.

And we threw Narties into the grave, instead of flowers.

Later, I went to my sister’s place to paint, dance and generally have a little fun.

By the time I got home around 8pm, I had a raging headache which settled in for the rest of the weekend. But then it hit me… been having these headaches nearly every weekend lately. What was the common thread?

Dang!

This naughty, naughty writer has been indulging in a coffee-a-day habit for about twelve months now (any more than one a day and I climb the walls). But on weekends I tend not to bother. It’s a workday habit. And actually, I didn’t drink coffee at all for many years because I’d read enough to understand what a powerful and damaging drug it is.

But then the lovely soothing latte aroma seduced me once again… doh! And now it seems, I’m getting coffee withdrawal symptoms when I go without for a day or two.

In my view, that means it has to go. No more once-a-day-lattes during the week. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, its feeling penned in by my own habits!

So I’ve gone cold turkey and I’m now on Day 4 of no coffee. I still drink green tea which has a teensy amount of caffeine, but nothing that’s gonna give me a case of the jitters, like a latte does.

Monday’s headaches were as bad as the weekend ones, but today (Tuesday) I’m feeling kinda okay again. Just need to keep hydrated to stay on top of it all.

There’s been so much going on, it’s been kinda hard to keep up with myself. But I’m hanging in there… more stories soon!

~Svasti

Narties for Margaret

Tags

cosmic coincidence, death, funeral, handicapped, Janefield Colony for Mental Defectives, Love, Margaret, mentally disabled, Narties, Peter Pan, second cousin, Smarties, special needs

She never called them by their proper name. I don’t think she could actually say the word Smarties, but she loved them fiercely. Narties were her favourite.

And this coming Saturday I’m going to her funeral – a woman no one can really say they knew intimately. Except for the little things about Narties, her love of cats and bright trinkets.

Much of what you or I take for granted as basic rights and freedoms were permanently denied to Margaret by cosmic coincidence.

She never travelled. Never went to school. She never read classic literature or rocked out to her favourite band. I’m not sure she even had a favourite band. She never rode on public transport by herself or had the chance to vote. She never had a facial, a massage, spent hours drinking wine and talking long into the night. Never rode a horse or camped under the stars. She’s certainly never been to a yoga class!

She’s never been kissed passionately or been made love to all night long.

I doubt very much that she spent hours, weeks, months or years in the grip of depression or self-loathing. Not even that, something we wish we didn’t experience, was available to Margaret.

Because her world was very small. Contained. And yet she was in her way, happy enough.

So who was Margaret? My second cousin, the only daughter of my maternal grandmother’s sister. Having made it to her sixties (quite marvellous for someone with her life-long health issues), she passed away from kidney failure in the early hours of Thursday morning.

To use language which horrifies the politically correct, yet draws a swift and relatively accurate picture – Margaret was retarded.

Or, as per the name of the institution she lived in for much of her life – Janefield Colony for Mental Defectives.

Mental Defective.

Using kinder terms, I guess you’d call my second cousin mentally disabled, handicapped, special needs… whatever.

PC or no, I find all these descriptions rather vague. I’m not sure if they ever gave her a proper diagnosis.

Margaret permanently lived in her own Peter Pan world and I often wondered it was like in there. Internally, she forever had a mental age of perhaps eight, while externally her body aged like everyone else’s.

She didn’t have a bad life, not once Janefield was closed and she moved into a managed house with live-in carers.

My immediate family were good to Margaret when few others cared, especially once her own parents died. We’d bring her over for Christmas while she tolerated us (eventually her anxieties meant leaving her home wasn’t feasible) and give her small gifts suitable for a young girl – costume jewellery, cat toys, scented talcum powder, bubble bath, and sweets.

Many would look at people like Margaret and feel pity or sadness. Or perhaps they feel nothing when they see the Margarets of this world. Or embarrassed, even.

Hardly anyone knows Margaret and even for those that did… there will be no outpouring of grief. Because there was almost no way to connect, interact.

Is that what love hinges on? This idea of our connection to the object of our affections? Where that object reflects back for us a view of ourself that we really like? And how does one connect anyway, to a person who can’t share anything in return?

Although I’ve known Margaret for much of my adult life, I can not cry at her passing. But I want to. I want to cry and say I wish we could have talked. I wish I knew how your life went. I want to ask you what you experienced and felt. I want to know if you were happy, content even. I want to know what you wished for, and if your wishes came true…

There won’t be a crowd at the funeral, because she never met many people. Never had the chance to, actually.

Mum asked me if I wanted to attend and my response was, of course. She deserves to have people pay their respects, I said.

Because even though her experience was so utterly different to the general human consensus of ‘normal’ life, she is still one of us, of course.

We can’t relate, we can’t share what her life was like because she could never tell us, but we can mark her passing with what we do know.

So come Saturday we’re bringing flowers, Narties and toy cats to her service.

And we’ll farewell this human life as she is released from her very contracted incarnation and flows back to Source.

Margaret, you’re in my thoughts and prayers. May your passage through the bardos be swift, and may your next incarnation be an expansive and joyful opportunity.

Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. Hari Om Tat Sat!

~Svasti