Last Friday night at about 8:30pm as Snooze and I sat watching the second season of The Wire and the thunder rumbled outside, my last remaining grandparent slipped quietly away in St Vincent's Hospital. She was 84.
Over the past five weeks she has been fighting a battle, harder than any of us expected, against a lifetime of three-packs-a-day smoking, plural plaque and mesothelioma in her lungs contracted by washing the asbestos out her husband's clothes every day after work. He died of mesothelioma in 1980 when I was three and she just 61. 13 years ago she lost her daughter, my mother. My Uncle is the last one of that family left and he's not yet 60.
Mercifully, she was was healthy up to the moment she was not. It was the flu that got her - attacked her lungs - the one part that simply couldn't fight back.
She was never a 'nice old lady'. She had an acid tongue and a particular flair for passive aggression, often beautifully pointed. But the grandkids loved her unconditionally and she loved us back, though sometimes it took a second visit to remember.
I saw her almost every day of the five weeks she was in hospital. It was a fascinating and humbling thing. There were peaks and troughs from week to week, but each time the troughs were longer and the peaks lower. Without her grandmotherly veneer, I was able to see her as a wonderful, strong but exhausted woman, terrified of what was coming, yet resigned to the inevitable.
We got SMS updates every morning from my Uncle letting us know how she'd slept. One morning she was being shown some photos and came across one of her husband. The message came through: "we looked at some some photos. She said "hello my beautiful man" to my dad". On another occasion she told us she already knew about Hawthorn winning the Semi-final by five points - she'd found out "yesterday".
The next time I saw her, I had been to a concert the night before. It was a choral thing in a church: "Songs of the Sea". I spent many years of my younger life around this music and the performance brought back the most extraordinarily powerful memories. Thinking my Grandmother might like to hear about it, I told her that my sisters and I had been. She looked at me and said: "Do you think, when I'm gone, I could be taken to things like that?" I was (as often happened) taken aback. "I think that's a great idea" I said. And then, to my dismay, her little face crumpled and she burst into tears. It was too hard, it hurt too much, she had nothing left.
As I left the hospital, the music and words of an anthem by Edgar Bainton resounded in my head. I had heard it for the first time in 15 years at the concert the night before and I had never felt it so intensely:
Over the past five weeks she has been fighting a battle, harder than any of us expected, against a lifetime of three-packs-a-day smoking, plural plaque and mesothelioma in her lungs contracted by washing the asbestos out her husband's clothes every day after work. He died of mesothelioma in 1980 when I was three and she just 61. 13 years ago she lost her daughter, my mother. My Uncle is the last one of that family left and he's not yet 60.
Mercifully, she was was healthy up to the moment she was not. It was the flu that got her - attacked her lungs - the one part that simply couldn't fight back.
She was never a 'nice old lady'. She had an acid tongue and a particular flair for passive aggression, often beautifully pointed. But the grandkids loved her unconditionally and she loved us back, though sometimes it took a second visit to remember.
I saw her almost every day of the five weeks she was in hospital. It was a fascinating and humbling thing. There were peaks and troughs from week to week, but each time the troughs were longer and the peaks lower. Without her grandmotherly veneer, I was able to see her as a wonderful, strong but exhausted woman, terrified of what was coming, yet resigned to the inevitable.
We got SMS updates every morning from my Uncle letting us know how she'd slept. One morning she was being shown some photos and came across one of her husband. The message came through: "we looked at some some photos. She said "hello my beautiful man" to my dad". On another occasion she told us she already knew about Hawthorn winning the Semi-final by five points - she'd found out "yesterday".
The next time I saw her, I had been to a concert the night before. It was a choral thing in a church: "Songs of the Sea". I spent many years of my younger life around this music and the performance brought back the most extraordinarily powerful memories. Thinking my Grandmother might like to hear about it, I told her that my sisters and I had been. She looked at me and said: "Do you think, when I'm gone, I could be taken to things like that?" I was (as often happened) taken aback. "I think that's a great idea" I said. And then, to my dismay, her little face crumpled and she burst into tears. It was too hard, it hurt too much, she had nothing left.
As I left the hospital, the music and words of an anthem by Edgar Bainton resounded in my head. I had heard it for the first time in 15 years at the concert the night before and I had never felt it so intensely:
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
neither shall there be any more pain:
for the former things are passed away.
Oh. I don't know what to say. This is a beautiful post. *tears*
ReplyDeleteOh. I don't know what to say. This is a beautiful post. *tears*
ReplyDeleteMy love to you and your family, Tom.
ReplyDeleteMuch love and strength Tom.
ReplyDeletex
all my love. your post was deeply moving.
ReplyDelete