In August’s installment of her monthly mental health column, writer and author, Beth McColl, opens up about losing her grandma and grief. Beth is the author of ‘How to Come Alive Again’ which is a relatable and honest practical guide for anyone who has a mental illness. She’s also very, very funny on Twitter.
Illustration by Chelsea Hughes
When I saw my grandma Jackie for the last time she was asleep in a bright, clean, quiet room overlooking a beautiful, flowering garden. All of her daughters were there, as was my brother and a few of my many cousins. We spent all day together in that room, swapping in and out of the chairs by her bed, our warm hands in her warm hands. We talked for hours. We cried a lot and laughed even more, which I know is what she would have wanted. She was never one to stand much fussing.
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It’s hard to overstate or explain Jackie’s importance, how much we adored her and why. Growing up it was she who looked after us during the week and the holidays, making us breakfast and tea and taking us to and from school and nursery. Rather than being embarrassed about this, I felt superior. She could have passed for a mum, but I made sure that people knew otherwise. Most of my classmates had a parent to meet them, but we had a grandparent, which was obviously worth way more points. Indeed, the word ‘grand’ is defined as magnificent and imposing and, though barely 5 feet tall, she fit that bill exactly.
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She passed away two days after I saw her. It was the third Thursday in July, 81 years and 120 days after she was born. Though we knew it was coming I’d managed to hold onto some magical, childish thinking, imagining her waking up, of there somehow being more time together. The pain I felt was a new pain. It was nothing like the wild longing after a break-up or a career disappointment or an episode of depression. It was a soft, bright pain, a pain the same shade and dimension as my love and gratitude for her. It beamed from us all in that room where she slept, and it’s beaming from me still, so new and bewildering that part of me thinks it must be temporary. After so many months of being separated by lockdowns, of waiting, being promised a reunion, a triumphant return to normal, it’s hard to believe in this new distance as one without end, that after almost 30 years of her being just up the road or on the other end of the phone she has gone somewhere that I can’t immediately follow.
I know that this stage of grief is acting as a lens, softening my feelings, elongating my patience and casting everyone I see in a more precious light. Soon enough I’ll move from this stage to the next. I’ll get more used to thinking of her in the past tense and will no longer expect her to text or call. I know that there’s a lesson in this about impermanence, gratitude, courage- a lesson that began before she died and is continuing now. The fact that life doesn’t go on and on is what makes it all so precious, and worth doing well. But how to do that? Here is my best guess, informed by our miraculous, magnificent Jackie: by expressing love and gratitude often and without prompting, by enjoying the work we do and taking pride in it and by telling the truth when it’s time to tell it, even when that’s very hard to do.
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I’m trying to take things one day at a time, not thinking further than the funeral next week, which I’m so grateful will go ahead without restrictions. We’ll all be allowed to attend, hold a wake afterwards, be together and carry out all of the simple, fundamental rituals of grief that were denied to so many families during the pandemic. I feel grateful too that she wasn’t alone, that we didn’t lose her to a virus that unjustly killed so many irreplaceable and dearly loved people of her age. At the end of her life my grandma was treated with tenderness and dignity. She was allowed the time it took. She was held and kissed and celebrated by her family, cared for by the most wonderful and brilliant hospice nurses. Her passing has cemented my belief that each of us deserve the same. It has reminded me that we must stand together against everything that keeps us from dignity and safety and security both in our lives and at the end of them- unchecked greed, slashed budgets, austerity and the widespread neglect of elderly, poor and disabled people. There is a last room for all of us, and I want that room to be as light and calm and full of love as Jackie’s was.
The weekend after my grandma died I went with a friend to Stephen Wright’s House of Dreams Museum in South East London, a permanent installation of sculptures, text, mosaics, paintings and found objects inside the artist’s own home. It’s a kind of living diary, a stunning, technicoloured celebration of love and loss and living. It’s a reminder that life is not only real in the moments where everyone is where we can see them and death feels far away. It is also real at the bedside, the graveside, in the empty places and the full. On the walls of the last hallway in the house are Stephen’s recollections of his own deepest grief and deepest loves, both for his late parents and partner. We stayed a long time in that hallway. It was sorrowful, but it was also a peaceful and beautiful moment in a life that is so often neither of those things.
I don’t know exactly what I believe about an afterlife or a place after this place, but I do know that my little nan will stay nearby in everything she taught us while she was alive. All of her most wonderful qualities- her strength, her goodness, her curiosity, her intelligence, her humour- remain here on this side of things, portioned out between the 5 daughters she raised, the 14 grandchildren they raised and the great grandchildren that they are raising now and will raise in future. She was so fiercely loved by us, but she was also just a person in the world, passing through the way we’re all passing through, visiting a while, beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. Thanks to her I know we will do our own passing through with a much greater measure of courage, curiosity and love than would have been possible without her. For that and for all the rest I am so, so grateful.
