Four Years Ago Today

Today is the anniversary of my Granny's death at the age of 86 from third stage Alzheimer's.

I was not very close to my Granny, due to family differences. They thought my mother was a bitch, she couldn't stand them. However, about 3 weeks before she died she asked for me. I went to see her a few times in those next few weeks. The first time I saw her she didn't really place me. I had to say my name and she said "Oh, Tommy's daughter." She then proceeded to say "You have such a beautiful face, but you should really lose some weight." Ah, grandmothers. Honest to a fault so they are. Funny that a few years before she was telling me I was too skinny.

Most of us were there the night my Granny died, my aunt Marie, Uncle Fred, my cousins Jane and Suzanne, my Uncle Gerry and my dad. Jane and I went home to check on our kids and when we came back she had died. They all thought she had waited until we had gone. I often wonder if she did.

I don't have as many memories of my Granny as I do of my Nan, who lived thousands of miles away. I remember my Granny and Granda moving to Canada, but I can't remember my Granny around the time of my Granda's death, not even two years later. I remember her making Jane and I kneel at the side of the bed with her for what seemed like hours as she prayed and then asked God to watch over the entire population of Belfast who had died since 1915. Or so I thought as there were so many names mentioned, on and on it went. I remember her giving me a rock hard Cadbury's Creme Egg, I didn't eat them for years after. She would make me eat cherry tomatoes with salt on them, uck. I remember her singing "You Made Me Love You" at my wedding reception, to the enjoyment of everyone (except for perhaps my mother, who held a grudge to the end, and still does) and I will always remember when Taylor was born and she found out that one of her middle names was Jude and she said "Oh, Emma, how nice to name her after St. Jude, he's the patron saint of lost causes you know." I replied that of course I had named her after St. Jude, when in reality it was after River Phoenix, a lost cause himself.

Something I never realized until I was older was how much my Granny had been through. Her mother had died when she was two, in a house fire thatI still don't know the cause of. Sometimes in my family it is hard to get a straight story. For years I had been told it was because of a cigarette burning in a sofa, sometime agoo someone said it was because a petrol bomb had been thrown through the window. Who knows, really. Needless to say, her mother was dead and she and her brother were soon after abandoned by their father. I don't know who raised them. A question I should ask. When she married my grandfather she was already pregnant with their first child, a bit of a scandal in 1935 Belfast. She took on not only my Granda but his entire family, the youngest child only 3 years older than her son. She herself was only 19 and already had 6 children to help raise. She always worked, while raising those kids and her own. When her dad came back when she was an adult she slammed the door in his face. I never understood this, but today I can see why. She lost 4 of her own children, 3 at birth or shortly thereafter and one as an adult. She stayed with an alcoholic, something I do not understand to this day. Her three remaining children moved away, one to Canada, two to England. Once two of her children were in Canada, she and my Granda decided to move here. In her later years, she lived with two of her children and had money stolen by one of them. She ended up in a somewhat dingy nursing home where she lived her last years with the Alzheimer's that eventually killed her.