(Not said by her and not said to her: "I remember it differently, that time - you don't remember because you weren't there." Why did she go, what did she feel? Now no one can remind her where she was, where the children were or with whom. Not that they ever did remind her; fairly or unfairly they blamed her but outwardly held their peace. We are all English, after all.)
There was also the small matter of her body - and it was a good deal smaller by the time they finished cutting her up in surgery, looking for the tumour and all its many children. Her body ended up in a cemetary in Prince George, BC, the same place her mother lies, unmarked, unvisited, beneath the grass. We're not cemetary visitors, us - something to do with with religiously despising the material body, or just an inability to confront death.
Her children sorted through her things - her books, her clothes, the vast numbers of cheap and useful household things she could not resist buying, from the Clapper to a screwdriver with every type of head invented. I was given a book of Tennyson's poems, barely held together with plastic tape on its leather cover and inscribed to my biological Grandfather from his mother. That was how I learned his given name - Gilbert - which I had never heard before. I still don't know his mother's name and I all I know about him are contradictory stories - he's either the abandoned ex-husband of a wandering woman or the indifferent or perhaps even cruel but certainly absent husband whose involvement with his children ended with conception. I treasure the book (in storage) as a connection to the past, whatever it was. Grandma thought the book was important enough to drag over from England and keep until her death - maybe she planned to give it back some day?
She left my parents the clock they despised. They are the generation that turns the hated key, hearing in the grinding of complex innards:
Ask not for whom they tollShe came from England (west midlands, small towns, birmingham, WWII, marriage, children, ballroom dance, romance, divorce court, gretna green, RAF mechanic, her father's name, her husband's name, her second husband's name - the one that stuck though he did not - parental forgiveness and a return to their religion, deaths of husbands, feuds with siblings, children moved abroad, children fervent with apocalyptic prophecy and children married young, a child divorced, a child abroad, a family abroad, a child in jail, and all the children breeding a host of grandchildren, a child fostered and adopted and a mother shrunken with age, senility turning her into a child...) to Canada, fleeing Thatcher and the winds of change in the motherland.
(those blasted chimes -
those noisome, trite, Big Ben imitations
their incessant, infernal ringing, day and night,
but particularly at night)
their ringing, it is for thee...
The whole family came (jumpers and sweets, beano and dandy, even dampness and distrust crossed the pond) and finally buried her in a hole in Pince Goerge, B.C. next to her mother (her mother, who came but might not have known where she was) (her mother, who raised her children for a while) (her mother, who was the convert and enforcer of the family's conversion).
And what I thought at the time she died was what a pity to end up there, where I started, the place I fled, the last place I'd want to end up - but then maybe she was fleeing the mirror of the familiar, as I have.
