“There’s no easy way to say this, but nan passed away this morning.”
I’ve walked by the Thames all year, almost every day. Time seems to have weirdly stood still and moved on at the same time during this pandemic. As I stood on the Southbank opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, hearing my mother’s words, I felt that more powerfully than ever and began to cry in disbelief.
Everything has stood still, yet everything’s changed. The old certainties I knew growing up were dying away. First my paternal grandad in May last year, and now my maternal grandma.
My grandma Mary was warm, sweet and kind. Like my grandad, I wanted to remember her.
Mary was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire in June 1934 and spent the war years growing up with her parents, Mabel and Moses (who always preferred to be called ‘James’) in Cleveleys, Lancashire. She was a well-loved child and adored by her father. Rather traumatically, it was Mary who discovered her father’s body when he died of a heart attack at the family home when she was 16.
It was only later in life, when she requested her full birth certificate, that Mary discovered that she had been adopted and Mabel and James were not her biological parents. Mabel’s daughter from a previous marriage, Florie, who Mary had been raised to believe was her elder half-sister, was actually her birth mother.
As Mary began to broach the subject with her birth mother, Florie’s face fell in horror as it dawned on her that her secret may have been discovered. Mary didn’t have the heart to push her for the truth. Sadly, there must have been an intense amount of shame surrounding the pregnancy of an unmarried 16 year old girl in the 1930s and the fear of discovery was evidently strong all of Florie’s life. Mary never found out who her biological father was.
When Mary was 14, she met a handsome boy called Roy on the school bus. Mary and Roy started dating, left school not long after and registered for work on the same day. Uniquely they probably have the record of being the only married couple with consecutive National Insurance Numbers.
Mary and Roy got engaged in 1952 and married in 1954 once Roy had finished his National Service. While Roy worked at British Rail, Mary worked in a range of shop assistant roles before they had their first daughter, Catherine, in 1958. Their second daughter, Helen, was born in 1962. As their daughters grew up, Mary took further jobs at schools, businesses, and shops, and got involved in voluntary community work. My grandparents were married for 66 years.
They moved back to their roots in Cleveleys and then St Anne’s to spend their final years. Mary was diagnosed with both vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s in January 2017. My mum, Helen, lived with my grandad for over a month to help care for her, but it became apparent that grandma needed specialist care.
She moved into a dementia care home in September 2017 where grandad visited her regularly until the Covid pandemic hit. He last saw her in August 2020. When the care staff checked on her at 2am on 31st January she chatted to them happily. When they came to check on her again at 4am, she had passed away peacefully in her sleep.
The hard thing with dementia and Alzheimer’s is that you grieve twice; once for the person you knew and loved who’s fading away, and the second time for their final passing.
I began to grieve several years ago when it became apparent that nan remembered less and less and she stopped doing the little things that made her grandma; the way she’d play with my hair when I was sat on the sofa, the cheeky smile she gave for no reason in particular, or the way her voice would get louder and louder as she relished telling a story we’d all heard multiple times before. Her memory was always very sharp but, in the end, even her oldest, securest memories weren’t safe from the deterioration of her mind. My family have all been grieving for the last few years for the Mary we knew.
Around the time my grandma went into the care home, I began to notice references in the Bible to God remembering the people of Israel:
“It is He who remembered us in our low estate, for his steadfast love endures forever” – Psalm 136:23
“He remembers his covenant forever, the promise he made, for a thousand generations” – Psalm 105:8
I took great comfort in this when my nan was first admitted to a dementia care home. I believe this God, who made Himself known to the people of Israel, is the same now as He always was and that the fulfillment of all His promises to them was found in the person of Jesus Christ, God revealed in flesh.
Although Mary may have forgotten everything else, God would always remember my grandma.
God knows more than anyone about the life of grandma Mary. He knows all her flaws, her failings, her mistakes. But he was there when she soothed my aunt and my mum as babies in the early hours of the night when Beatlemania swept the country and Britain emerged from post-war austerity, He saw her knitting clothes for her grandchildren, and He knows all the hopes and dreams she’d had, fulfilled or not.
“you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb… all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” – Psalm 139:13-16
Although grandma Mary may have been a teenage girl’s secret ‘accident’ in the 1930s, she was never an absentminded thought in the mind of God. She had a purpose, to love and be loved, and in the life that she was given testify to the grace of God. Life is a gift and we live in the presence of the God who gives it to us.
Now, Mary, daughter of God, is at rest. She is at home with God, where we all find our true home. One day, she’ll not only see all things made new, but be made new herself. There will come a day when we will not stumble or forget who we truly are.
Going home, going home
I’m jus’ going home
It’s not far, yes close by
Through an open door
I’m jus’ going home
(“Going Home”, William Arms Fisher, 1922)
The Road to Emmaus 