TheBanyanTree: Another death

[JMoney]

My father's mother died last week.  She'd been in one of those assisted care
places for years, gradually getting more and more forgetful but otherwise
doing pretty well.

Actually, she was she was constitutionally very strong.  When she was in her
mid-eighties she started having trouble swallowing.  It turned out that she
had an oesophageal stricture.  So she had a major operation in which the
scarred part was replaced with a piece of bowel.  Apart from going a bit ga
ga in the first couple of days afterwards (anaesthetics tend to do that to
old folks) she sailed through her recovery and went back to enjoying
non-pureed steak dinners.  Sometime later, while on a visit to her son and
daughter-in-law, she had a bit too much sherry, took a fall and finished up
with a sub-dural haematoma.  The blood clot between her brain and her skull
got drained and, again, she recovered without problems.  For the last ten
years or so she's been carrying on as usual, only having a few problems with
her hips and knees, but finally everything seemed to fall apart at once and
she was gone in a week.  She was 99.  Missed out on her telegram from the
Queen.

That's not all she missed out on.  She missed out on being loved though I
don't think she'd have noticed.  What she probably would have noticed would
have been not getting as much attention as she wanted.

Took me years to work that out.  Partly that's because we didn't have much
to do with her when I was a child.  In fact, after we came back from Brunei,
Dad moved us to NSW just so he didn't have to live close to her.  We only
saw Nanna and Pop when they came to visit, which was rarely, but according
to my mother always for far too long.  Right now I can only remember one
visit they made and I remember it because of the fuss over the dining room
table.

My sister was studying for her Intermediate Certificate.  We'd had lunch
and, not having her own desk, she wanted to use the table to work on her
books.  She waited.  Nanna didn't move.  She waited some more.  Nanna kept
sitting.  Finally she asked if she could have the table to do some homework.
Nanna took offence.  She got up, but in a huff, and made loud comments about
... what?  Something along the lines of rude and ungrateful grandchildren.
See, the table and chairs had been Nanna and Pop's originally.  They'd given
it to Mum and Dad to use but I guess Nanna still looked on it as hers to sit
at for as long as she wanted.

So as a child, silently taking everything together, I'd looked on Nanna A as
a crabby, misery-guts old cow.  She was nothing like my beloved Nanna Dep
who smelled of Yardley's April Violets talcum powder and was always laughing
and kind.

After Pop A died Mum took pity on Nanna A and arranged for her to move into
a little flat about ten minutes' drive away.  By then I was a grown woman
perfectly able to observe, and reflect on, the dynamics of my father's
relationship to his mother.

I noticed that my father was short, even short-tempered with her.  Sometimes
he astonished me with his rudeness to her.  In the way that women do I asked
my mother about it.  The stories I heard!  Astonishing stories!

Poor Uncle Bruce, the youngest of her children, was afraid of the dark so
when Nanna wanted to punish him she would lock him outside at night.  Then
there was the mystery of the boarder who departed in a hurry one day after
Pop came home from work early and a lot of shouting was heard.  There was
Mum's poor little shilling-a-week insurance policy that money was sent to
Nanna to pay but which, when it matured, she claimed to have paid for with
her own money.  That was her justification for taking a big chunk out of the
proceeds for herself.  There was a poor-me story she used to tell, even into
her seventies, about having to run across the fields to get some butter or
something when she was just a little girl.  And there's more but by now
you'll get the drift.

I got to the point of disliking her enough to worry about how many of her
genes I'd inherited.  She was greedy, selfish, self-righteous, hypocritical
and self-pitying.  She'd complain about anything and if she didn't complain
she'd sit there with a sour look on her face so that it was obvious to
anyone with half an ounce of discernment that Nanna Was Not Happy.  That
look was enough to make anyone try very hard to ignore her.  What I didn't
realise was that it was supposed to prompt interest in her.  Someone was
supposed to make her the focus of their attention and ask her what was the
matter.

I figured it out one day when I was looking through old photographs.  Nanna
A only ever smiled for a photograph when she was the only person in the
frame.

Sometimes I thought that she kept on living because God was giving her more
time to look into herself, find the source of her problems there and change
her ways.  But she never did.  I feel sorry for her, that she was
dissatisfied and unhappy for so long, but I'm not sorry she's gone.
Sometimes one person's death can give many other people the freedom they
need to reconsider, and maybe remake, their own lives.

Janice