Texas Attemtped: A storyteller lost

I just got the phonecall. My grandmother died at noon. She sat at the table, gave a small cough, and then passed away.

It was my Dad who told me. It's always him who breaks the news. When my rabbits died, when Uncle Maurice crashed in the racing car, when my brother Alex "went to live with Jesus". The way he breaks it - so business-like, emotionless, like the 'any other business' at the end of a conference. Somehow heartless, but utterly effective... at least for me. It does not do for us to show too much emotion, being as we are.... whatever we are. Men perhaps... soldiers... whatever the fuck it is that stops us talking. Me? Yeah, perhaps just me...

And so, Ethel Elizabeth Davis is gone. 93 years old. Perhaps she was one of the last people alive called "Ethel" - a name so old. It's so hard to speak about her with any sense of glory. People called Ethel don't have great epitaphs. They do not live in the songs of a warrior-poet. No thunder nor quaking lungs, no upturned fists. Ethel died in the nursing home of St Johns. "Our Ethel". Gone.

The others will speak of her, and say their lines, long-rehearsed and made novel with the slight liberations that they are moved to by their public hearts. And I will sit here, the strange one of the family, and what I could never speak I will put into a blog.

I write my thoughts in a realm she never understood; she goes into realm I cannot comprehend.

I did not know my grandmother. She was just one of the countless that I appeased with shallow smiles and supplications - someone who I waited for to depart, just like anyone else who ever spoke to me in my teenage years. She knew me as a quiet boy, who seemed so happy and said the right things and never caused her any pause for self-reflection. I was a false projection in her life... a lie... an image of a grandson.

The truest moments where when I said nothing. When I would sit (in the early days, when she still had her faculties) and listen to her stories. She had the amazing ability to always tell me something new. Born in 1914, her life was broken through with chapters and scenes, and every time I sat with her she would show a different one.

Sure, I had to nod and grunt and say "yeah" to her every relay, but it was a small price to pay. It spared me from talking to her. I am more myself when I listen in the shade of others.

Such a strong woman she was. But never the strength that I would acknowledge in my proud rationales. She was the hub of a family, the grand matron by the oven who cared for those around her, cooking, cleaning, escorting and controlling. She looked after the young and the sick, caring without thought, working without agenda. Her whole life dedicated to others.

It started during the war, when she worked as a post mistress. And then when she adopted my auntie, the child of an unfaithful wife, abandoned at a hospital. And at a time it reached its apex, when she cared for her husband, Bill, who was wheelchair bound, and for me and my brothers, who she helped each day to school. She believed it was her place - the place of all women - and it gave her a pleasure that few could really understand.

But when Bill passed away it all began to slip. For a while she held onto her ethic, devoting herself to the grandchildren and to the upkeep of her home. But soon it crumbled. Soon the realisation crept beneath her skin: that she was no longer able to care for others. Now it was her turn to be helpless.

She never embraced this. And as her dependence grew she became something more than what she had been - something more complete and humanly imperfect. She began to acknowledge the other side of her that she had held at bay for over eighty years. The bitterness, the selfishness, the affirmation and the spite. Her deepest story had yet to be told - the story of all her frustrations and thwarted dreams, her dissatisfactions and disillusions. And in her haste to tell this story before the Reaper quelled it, it was leant wings by rage.

And so this once gentle giant became nasty. Her cruelty was felt most strongly by my mother, always the closest daughter to her - the one who emphasized her dependence on others. And to my mother Ethel said the things that she had never said before - the hateful things, the dark things. All the clutter of a soul in peril. The Ethel that we had known was gone.

My auntie began to search for her birth-mother, tracking down her half-sisters and uncovering the story of why she was abandoned at the hospital. Perhaps she was trying to come to terms with the Mother-Figure in her life - to reach a state of understanding with her inception. My own mother did likewise: she came to terms with her maternal entity in the face of Ethel's spite.
I told my mother that she now had a part to play - that she was the receptacle of everything that was left unspoken in Ethel. I hope it comforted her. I can only hope that I have such a vessel as my mother when my end is near - a victim-confessor; a masochistic angel.

When Ethel had the stroke, the cruelty faded. What came in its place was a mish-mash, fragments of her personality floating on a dark ink. At times the old grandmother would return, and she would remember who I was and ask about my new life in Cornwall and whether I fancied the nurses at the old people's home. At times the wrath would re-surface, and she would tell my mother that she found her in the gutter.

But for the most part, she was somewhere that we could not imagine. A nightmare world of delusions, where ships sailed past the windows of the home, where people carved up meat, and where water ran through giant holes in the floor. I remember shuddering when I heard her speak of these delusions. It made me wonder at the fragility and complexity of the mind, at how the reality we know is but the smallest convergence atop a labyrinth of memories and nightmares. It made me feel at times the conscious effort with which I upheld my own sanity and absented from my private worlds.

My Aunty Denise would have an answer to this end. She would say as she said of Maurice, my uncle who crashed behind the wheel of a speeding race car and dwindled in a coma that brought him unto death. She would say that my grandmother had a lesson to learn, and that she was brought into a state of utter dependence in order to learn that lesson. For one who had lived so strongly as a helper and provider, the Karmic end was assured, and her helplessness was the final state through which she would find enlightenment.

Perhaps this was so. I like to think that she was granted a space in which to vent her bitterness, to rail at the Reaper and affirm the things that she had always suppressed. To tell that final story which could not be framed by kind words.

Perhaps she should have written a blog. She may have been nicer to my mother at the end.

Or perhaps she should have read mine, and understood more than I let on in my projected convenience. Perhaps she would have realised that I loved her and that I thought about her and cherished her stories. And perhaps she would have forseen the man that I am set to be. A man who is more than that monosyllabic teenager that used to grunt at her. A man who would bring a wife and great-grandchildren to meet her and show that the family she had sustained through all her ethics had flourished.

Ethel was there when my brother died. She was the first one who hugged me, because my father could not, being as we are...

I stayed at her house while I waited for word of Alex from the hospital. She looked after me so well. She gave to me the cheerful hope that was dashed when the news of Alex's death finally arrived. She was with me in my darkest hour. And like Alex, I have not known a life without Ethel. She had always been there, as Alex had.

But like when Alex died, I cannot cry. It would break me utterly to do so.

But she will be there when the breakdowns come... every three months or so when I lose all control and lapse into fits of helpless tears and violence. She will be there amongst the weight that overloads me.

So many stories lost. I cannot bear it. As I cannot bear to read that which I will not remember, or write that which will not be published. Oh God... how can we lose so much? O for a muse to scream our stories at the heavens...

I weep more for my frail poetry. Enough of it.

Ethel, I will be there at your funeral. And I will remember you. Like Alex and like Maurice you were snatched from this world before your story was fully told. But I will tell it, I swear to you. I take the weight of my family upon me, I inflict the agony upon myself. I bear the burden because no one else will. And though you would have wanted me to live my life freely, I cannot while this injustice stands.

To Ethel Elizabeth Davis, 1914 - 2007. You shall be avenged.