“There are some things from Nan in a box on the dressing table for you to sort through. Take anything you want.”
My grandmother had passed away in early 2021, while the borders between New Zealand and Australia were still firmly locked down to contain COVID. Because of this, I’d missed her funeral, and since it took place the day after my wedding, I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to watch via livestream. Then, devastatingly, when the extended family gathered a year later to scatter her ashes, I contracted COVID after flying to New Zealand and was confined to my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house for a week. Having missed two opportunities to say a formal goodbye to my Nan, I’d intended to say goodbye in my own way, sometime later. Except, I hadn’t really got around to it. Mostly because I didn’t know how.
A couple of weeks ago I took my first trip back to New Zealand since that ill-fated family gathering, and the void of Nan’s absence, which had been so easy to overlook while I was 2000km away at home in Australia, was now casting a long shadow. The world was tilted slightly askew, like walking into a room and finding certain objects tipped over by a gentle earthquake (I use this analogy because you’ve grown up in New Zealand, earthquakes are par for the course). It’s difficult to measure the weight of death when it’s happened in your absence, and all the formal end-of-life rites having taken place without your heart bearing witness. The book is still open, so many words still unformed.
Now my mother was offering me something material to grasp, as a token of that loss. But I couldn’t find anything big enough. I don’t mean big enough in physical dimensions, but in emotional gravity. None of the small ornaments or photos were up to the task of helping me carry my grandmother’s memory with me. I found an ugly (it has to be said) indigo-hued porcelain bell embellished with garish pink flowers. Should I keep it? I didn’t really want it. But would I regret leaving it behind? I decided to come back and have another look before I left, but I got distracted and forgot.
I’ve written before about how some possessions can be portals to sentimental worlds that are alive in both recent and distant memory, and in hindsight, I guess I was hoping an object from this small cardboard box might do the same. Ultimately I walked away empty handed, but now I think, maybe that’s okay.
What if I am already carrying the beauty of my grandmother’s love within me? What if the best memory of her is not contained in the vignettes in my head, nor energetically wrapped around a material object, but threaded through every good thing I do with love? Not because of what she did, as such, but because she gave me a feeling of emotional safety that I did not always have elsewhere. What if her nurturing care of me is the stardust I sprinkle through all of my best work? My tenderest words to people who need them, my most critical reassurances to the people I love? What if that was the thing I was meant to carry all along?
When someone dies, I worry I will forget them. That the vibrancy of their laugh will fade, the feeling of their arms around me will ebb. I’m starting to understand that time robs us of someone’s physicality but the best stuff is what we offer up to others on our best days, by virtue of having known that person. The kind words, the non-judgemental ear, the tissue offered to a sobbing stranger on a bus. I have been saying a long goodbye all along and I didn’t even know it. It doesn’t feel enough but somehow, it’s everything.