Family ties bind, but what happens when memory fades?
Photo: Illustration: Kerry Ann Lee/The Wireless
My grandmother waves a hand to the Port Hills, thick with cloud. “I farmed up there once,” she says. “You know, with the boys.”
It isn’t true. Neither is her knowledge of me. But when I arrive at her retirement home she gasps in surprise and opens her arms. “It’s you!” she says, and I wrap myself into her, as if our closeness can bridge the muddy waters of her memory.
My brother and I are preparing to visit her in Christchurch for Christmas. He will soon depart for five years in London, and we both know that this may be the last time he sees her lucid, or even living.
I try to dull his expectations of the strong, cattle-mustering, sheep-shearing, dog-rearing woman we choose to remember. “She probably won’t know who you are,” I say. “But she’ll know that she loves you.”
Each time I see my Gran I sit on the floor beside her chair and lay my head in her lap. Her fingers find the knots in my hair like instinct, and she gently unravels them, as she has always done. I try not to cry because I like to think she doesn’t know how lost she often is to me. But this is the love, the knowledge, that I mean.
I am still the little girl who, in a fit of need, told my Gran that when I looked at the moon, I thought of her. She said she thought of me right back. I am still the little girl who told her that people who knew about dolphins knew everything, and she knew about dolphins so clearly she was a genius. She chuckled and pulled out an encyclopedia so we could learn some things she didn’t know, together. The details are lost but it’s the acts of love that live in her body, and bring us back to each other.
I have not, however, always been kind to my Gran. My greatest fear, when her memory began to fade, was that she would only remember the worst of me.
We nursed my mother together as she died of cancer. I was a teenager and some days, most days, the responsibility was too much. My mother spent much of her time at a hospice, trying to find the right balance of pain medication, and it was just my Gran and I in the house with Mum. Gran was fussy and constant and, I later realised, unbearably sad. But I was irritated, heartbroken and tired of being kind.
On Gran’s birthday that year I had reached the very limits of myself, and I begged her to leave.
She cried as she walked to her car.
She knew the very people she was trying so hard to heal had rejected her, same way my grandfather laughed off her homemade custard when he was dying and I thoughtlessly bought him the packaged stuff from the city.
We didn’t speak for some time, until Mum called her and begged her back. I never said I was sorry. I am so sorry. But there was nothing that 18-year-old could have done differently and there’s nothing I can say now. I lost the chance to earn the forgiveness she gave me so readily, and I am not sure I ever deserved it.
I sometimes envy my cousins because of the new life our Gran’s memory has offered them. In her room sits a digital photo frame that pictures them as young and so, to her, they still are. I try to tell her about Johnny’s children but she tells me I am mistaken - he's tall, she says, for his age. But he isn’t a grown up. He couldn’t be a father.
I, however, am generally afforded a life now gone. She never asks about Mum, which I think means that some part of her has registered the loss. Or that I have grown into the face my Mum bequeathed me well enough to be a good substitute. “This is my daughter, Trudi,” she tells her fellow residents, with pride. It’s only in the moments when she really isn’t sure that I bother to correct her, and so confuse her: “your granddaughter, Kirsti”. And she laughs, and she takes my hand very gently, still the polite, generous woman she has always been. “I’m such a forgettery,” she says.
I never expected to lose a grandparent without the buffer of a generation. My brother and I were building Lego towers in his bed on the morning, almost 20 years ago, that our dad told us of the sudden death of his father. I didn’t register my Dad’s sadness, only my own, as well as my fear of being lifted to kiss Granddad’s ice-cold cheek.
When my Mum’s Dad died, she and I shared a bed and cried together. Though I was a little older I was still sheltered from the depths of my pain by its collective nature: as a family, we grieved together.
But I’m afraid to be my Mum for Gran. I’m afraid to parent myself though the dense wilderness of forget. As my mother died, Gran stroked her hair back from her head and whispered “you’ve done so well, my darling”. Would she do the same for me?
I ask myself, constantly, if I am doing this right. The visits, the laughter, the trips for hot chocolate. Going along with her stories so as not to scare her. Listening to her parables on the lives of the home’s goldfish. Should I move to Christchurch to be close to her? Should I give her the apology I need more than she does?
Mostly, I wonder if this is genetic. If I, too, will forget my Mum. My paternal grandmother died before I was born and so she is only a name to me. My kids won’t know much more of my mother, and even if I live for a long time it seems she might fade into a story on a hillside, a once-was that cannot quite be placed. And I’m afraid.
What I do know is that my Gran is still a person who deserves choices and respect and all the independence she can tolerate. I know that my aunt and uncle take her out and make sure she’s cared for. I know many of us struggle to find the time to see her but I also know that there are many reasons why we vary in our capacity to give.
It might be my five years of disability support work that make visits with Gran wonderful some days and just bearable on others. I understand the way she wanders through syntax and reality and I can see the signs of fatigue in her before she is able to articulate them. I am not special, just trained - although much of that training was a childhood idolising her and an adolescence aching with her. We know each other by marrow if not by name, and I know that she must have back all the love, patience and understanding she gave four kids and eight grandchildren.
Earlier this year Gran stayed with her sister, my great-aunt Jean. Jean has a friend who shares my mother’s name and she told Gran a story about bumping into this other Trudi on a walk in the bush. “Oh!” gasped Gran. “Where did you see Trudi? I haven’t seen her in such a long time. Is she coming home?” I imagine a cloud crossed Gran’s face for a moment, as she had entered the dream I often have in which I get angry with my mum for her absence. But Jean said she looked so eager, so whole, until the conversation rolled on.
If this is what my Gran needs then of course I will give it to her. Mum is out on a long walk. She hasn’t called, but she’s coming. In a way all three of us, three fierce generations, are just coming home to each other.
We don’t need memory for that. All we need is a way to stand together on this threshold, between life, death and that shadowy place in which confusion blurs hard edges. Maybe it does lie somewhere over the Port Hills. Maybe the way I tell my Gran I’m sorry is in believing her.
And she stands outside her door and waves until I drive to the very end of the driveway. And the moon is bright.