memory-333

[memory-333]

Found

Each year, on 20 November, trans and gender diverse people (together “trans”) gather as a community to mourn and remember our lost siblings on Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR).

Day-break, blaze horizon meets brightness and overhead a sky so blue, and you

leaning back against the window-frame Inhaling the cold, remembering fading overlays, morning onto morning

We stand and watch, until the sky catches itself in blush, and thinking again, goes blank. Somehow, you found the Moon.

*

You keep a list of lost things on your computer - some you expect to find again: nail file, guitar string-winder radiator key. Others you keep, against hope:

Lyrics to a song you woke up dreaming, and thought they would never leave.

*

I found you on the moor-top wide wind in the colour of the lichens, Autumn berries and dark-wood over limestone maps

I found you in the gallery bewitched by Victorian portraiture thinking about form and beauty. Dreaming in your freedom.

I saw you in the street in June walking, brisk towards the city I knew it was you, the way your arms moved - you were always too far ahead

I couldn't call or follow But remembered you then, and felt glad.

[memory-333]

Evelyn

On the night that she passed away, it was the sound of my Grandma's name, that visited me. Two syllables. 'Eve' - its sound, so small. The night in which we lie awake, waiting for the morning. But also, a source: the mother of all living. Then the second syllable, which could be a name for others, but completed hers.

Evelyn.

She was known to many of her friends as 'Widdy'. To me, she was 'Grandma Widdowson', until she was the only grandparent I had in the world. Then, she was simply, Grandma.

Grandma moved in the world in all the ways that she loved people: of course, as a Mum, as a wife, as a sister. To many (remember the endless strings of Christmas cards on her wall!) as a dear friend.

Her aspects shone like the sides of a fine house (could it be Beningbrough Hall?) in the late-Summer Sun. Each of these relationships is a long line that she drew across the years: continuous in her constancy.

She loved children and babies, raising four of her own - and then worked in schools and church 'Primary', where each Sunday, the little ones would sing. She wrote down all their birthdays, to remember them.

I remember being a little one to Grandma, and then suddenly we swapped, she becoming small, for me. For most of our years, she fit under my arms when we hugged.

Her hands were slender: soft and deliberate. Her fingers would press a piece of fabric, flattening something down. Or on a morning, holding an ancient knife, removing the edges of pieces of toast to make little Marmite toast boys and girls, because that's how she could make breakfast special for us.

*

We called it 'Grandma's house': the home she made for her family. She lived in the same house at the end of a road for more than half of her long life.

In some of my earliest memories, after playing in the garden with its bright flowers, or hiding in her under-stairs cupboards, it's bath-time. I play in the soapy water with a red and blue plastic boat, my head just above the bubbles, imagining ocean scenes. Then Grandma dries us off vigorously in the living room: clouds of talc, by the warmth of the gas fire.

The carpet is the same in those memories, as it is on that day that I write this.

I went to Grandma's house to stay, three times in my life. The longest stretch was before we moved to Australia. Later, during my exam periods, I went to stay in 'Peter's bedroom', a cosy room with a desk, and a view back towards my home. But staying at Grandma’s house was so safe and special, that it seemed like another world. An ornamental plate on the wall of that room had a winding chime, and at night she would turn the windmill on its painted scene, so it played 'Tulips from Amsterdam'.

*

I remember my Grandma crying, when I was seven years old, when she received a phone call telling her about the death of her oldest brother, Peter. She was inconsolable in that moment. The sound of her grief is one of my earliest memories of death: the realisation that not everything fades out. Some things arrive decisively: they are taken from us. They find us, at an end.

I’ve often found it difficult to cry, but even the thought of my Mum's tears bring mine, surely, and soon after. I remember many of the occasions in which my mother cried.

My daughter Cara and I were listening to music and dancing when my Mum called.

"It's hard to imagine she'll bounce back," Mum said.

"How are you feeling?" I asked.

Anticipating loss, I heard emotion in Mum’s voice in that moment. Yet, she had more phone calls to make, to tell my brothers.

After we ended the phone call, I sat quietly. Soon tears broke from me, too, in waves. I turned to Cara, embracing in the realisation of our grief.

*

The day of Grandma's passing was a social media occasion. I expect that if she had been born later, she would have enjoyed the celebratory and friendly energy shared on days like this: the 8th March, International Women's Day. A friend of mine had pointed out that this originated as a Socialist observation: a call for worker's solidarity.

In so many ways, Grandma was a woman who fulfilled every hope that our society could have had for her. She raised four children who each themselves married, bought houses, lived and worked and contributed richly, in their own ways. She was a good neighbour and friend.

But Grandma's house is different to any other. An end-terrace with a wide and beautifully-kept garden. Inside, (for many years) a serving hatch connected between the kitchen and living room. At some point, the council scheduled the house for renovation, and suddenly the hatch was gone.

She refused to purchase the house under the 'right to buy', despite urging. I always believed that she decided this as a matter of principle. But the idea was radical to me. Owning a house was, in every other part of my world, pitched as the highest goal of economic well-being.

And yet, radiating beyond her individuality, Evelyn was part of many human families: part of many worlds. She was, most beautifully, half of a double: 'Grandma and Grandad Widdowson', pronounced in that order.

Grandad, a gentle presence: retired joiner and gardener. Grandma, the baker of cakes, singer, writer of letters and cards. They were married for more than sixty years. I can't begin to imagine how she bore that loss. Despite her grief, it felt like she didn't slow down. I was sometimes unsure about how often to mention my memories of him, when I was around her.

I can't know the many different ways in which she must have lived alongside his memory. For so many days, to wake up alone in the bed they shared for almost a life-time. The same bed, where we as grandchildren ran on a morning, when we stayed over:

"There were six in the bed and the little one said

Roll over, roll over!"

Grandad, of course, was always the one who was pushed out of bed, designated to go and make us our toast.

"There were five in the bed, and the little one said

Roll over, roll over!"

Soon the house will be prepared for new occupants. A family, probably among the most needful in our city, will live in those rooms. Perhaps the room my mother first slept in as a newborn, will become a young girl’s bedroom, again.

This common-sense thought somehow seems incredible to me, however: that a house that was such a part of our family for my whole life, will very soon become someone else's. And yet, her choice seems greater than I could have made. The house stands, like so many of her actions in life, as a legacy.

*

I cry as I write this, because a source of love is gone from the world. Grandma lived most of her life in the twentieth century: a time of incomprehensible conflict and suffering. And yet, the century before that must have also been filled with people who loved through times of war. And the century before that. Evelyn was sixteen when Britain mobilised against fascist imperialism, and she made a life for her family through years of rationing and extreme austerity. She learned how to make things last. She understood how to create enough love to share, to go around.

Evelyn: meaning 'to live, to breathe'. To hold each newborn baby in her arms, on her rocking chair, where the runners had worn lines in that ancient carpet. She held our two children, cooed and kissed and talked to them. We were all held by her, in our time.

*

When I walked over to visit Grandma at the hospital, I felt like I was going to say goodbye. I didn't know for sure that it would be the last time I spoke to her, but I felt that this visit was different from other visits.

Mum and Aunty Jean were there, in the small, clean hospital room. Of course I didn't know what to say, but I held Grandma’s hand. The same hand, which had held me through my whole life. I held onto her this time, her palm in mine.

It felt different, standing, then kneeling by her bedside. She was unable to speak. I couldn't entirely hold back my tears in that moment. Mum stood on the other side of the bed, and I saw her tears: after mine, or before, I didn’t know. I felt grateful to share in that moment, understanding that we were close to an ending.

"I'll come back in a day or so," I said, because that's the kind of thing I would have said on another kind of visit. She would always be there, surely, in future days.

The last words I said to her were:

"I'll see you again soon."

Despite my inadequacies, I was right. I see her everywhere: Evelyn.

I will see her for the rest of my life, carrying her within each cell of my body.

A wife, a sister, a mother, my Grandma, our Great-Grandma.

As I look for love in the world, in all its forms, I will find her.

And I will see her, when I close my eyes.