My grandparents were keen recyclers, but out of necessity –
they were frugal and careful with resources. Reduce, reuse, recycle was a
lifestyle rather than a philosophy. They reused everything till it fell apart. They
had newspaper-made bin liners long before they were trendy, because everything
went into the compost, in order to nurture their impressive home vegetable garden.
Nan’s love of gardening, artistic flair and competitive
streak blossomed into floral arrangements and local competitions. She’d spend
hours, in her retirement years, thinking about and scouring the garden for the
just the right bloom, in just the right size or colour, or that would fit a
theme or style. To this day, I still
scan for lovely vases, and interesting vessels in second hand and antique shops..
One even stands out in my mind, when the arrangement needed to be less than 5 centimetres
tall including the vase. She planned that arrangement for weeks to finally win
first prize with the daintiest of garden flowers– we looked at the garden as
giants looking for the best options for what could have been a Barbie doll
bridal bouquet. Many years later, she and my aunty would prepare all the flowers,
bouquets and button holes for my wedding.
Nan was a rock in my life; a reserved lady who cared about
manners and decorum. As a teacher, and one who was quite proper, she influenced
my love of words, grammar and writing through books and games – family favourites
such as Scrabble and Upwords. My own
children grew up with a game called Bananagrams, a scrabble-esque game that I
know she would have loved. She would
have come up with all the tricky words, while we’d be searching the dictionary
(pre internet) for the words that none of us had heard of. Even though she was,
in my mind a gifted wordsmith, she had a teaching reputation of a gifted
remedial reading tutor, enhancing the reading capabilities of hundreds of young
people. Looking back I think she connected with me as I was such an
enthusiastic learner, I often read anything I could from her bookshelf, which were
not always age-specific. After absorbing a Māori grammar book from her shelf,
aged 8, she often introduced me to a range of topics – gauging my interest, including all those garden ones.
Teaching was her second career, somewhat impressive for
women at the time. Before teaching, she’d been a nurse and taught me to care
about perfectly folded sheets (a two-person job) and hospital corners when
those sheets went on the beds. She was an army nurse, had her first child in a
house with a dirt floor, and married a progressive man who knew how to sew,
cook and do the washing – as well as grow vegetables. He encouraged her to
pursue teaching.
My grandparents gave my upbringing the depth of support that
every child needs. But they were also ambitious for me. They valued my opinion,
challenged my assessment of the world around me, and set expectations to live
up to. I am very grateful to have had had them both for so long.
In many ways we lost Nan a number of years before her body
went. As dementia crept in, she became more and more distant. Although, her physical presence reminded us
of what she was to us, the relationship, by necessity had to change. The last few times I saw her was a practise in
letting go. She still held my hand and sometimes, I think she knew that she
knew me, somehow, and even occasionally knew we were connected, but she couldn’t
put all the fragments together. It became harder and harder to take her away
from her now home, as she became more and more disoriented, unable to remember
where she was, where she belonged, who she belonged to. This experience has
allowed me to have a few conversations with my own children, about how to
transition through dementia. Some family members have a hard time during the
change, hard time with the loss that comes from a loved one who forgets who you
are. If I live that long, as many of my relatives have, it’s likely to happen
right?
So, in the meantime, what sort of Nana do I want to be?
First and foremost, there will be unconditional love, and
reassurance to my own children, their parents, that everything will be ok.
Second, there will be books, and reading, and days cuddling up on the couch
with blankets in literary heaven. There will be gardening. Even if I learn as
well, along the way. I will transfer my academic knowledge into some sort of
skill – we’ll learn together. We will run our hands through the dirt, and name
the flowers, and plant courgettes. We are going to laugh, and enjoy life, and
find the humour in every day. And I hope I can help them look up and out at the
world though a loving lens, to look for context, and seek justice, and know that
is good in the world, and sometimes they need to be the good in the world.
But most of all, I want them to have a wonderful memories of
time with Nana, someone who loves them, that they can carry with them, long
after I’m gone.
...
We are … in the habit of imagining our lives to be
linear; a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to
surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is
a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons
when we flourish, and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare
bones. Given time, they grow again. - Henry Thoreau
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