My last encounter with Grandma

THIS IS A MEMORY I CAN’T FORGET – AND CAN’T EXPLAIN

Iwas five years old when my grandmother died. She slept in a bed in the sitting room downstairs, and I used to get up before anyone else, to go down and be with her, climbed on the bed. Throat cancer meant she couldn’t speak, so we looked at Bible story picture books together, and I read to her.

This was my grandfather’s house. Our own house was a terraced house – a row house – with just a rear yard. My mother was nursing Grandma through her cancer, and so we all moved into Grandad’s house. It was an unhappy, tense time. My mother hated her father, and he hated having us in the house. But he could save money on hiring a nurse, cook, and cleaner.

The one thing everyone enjoyed were roses. Old-fashioned, scented English roses. One morning, Grandma got out of bed and went to the big bay window overlooking the garden. She couldn’t speak but she spoke. ‘Look at the Queen of Denmark.’ I scrambled off the bed and went to the window. (It is the name of a beautiful rose with a powerful scent.) We stood together. She touched my head. Then, she walked through the window, into the garden, and along the rose hedge.

It was so natural. There she was, in the garden, among the flowers she loved.

I heard someone coming downstairs. It was my mother. I ran into the hall and told her that Grandma was in the garden with the Queen of Denmark. At that moment the telephone on the hall table began to ring. This was in the 1960s, but the telephone was from the 1920s. My mother picked up the receiver and the base; speaking and listening were in two parts on those telephones. ‘Hello. Woodfield House. Hello?’ There was no one there.

We went into the sitting room. Grandma was in bed. Grandma was dead.

To this day I can’t explain what happened that day. I know I wasn’t frightened, and I can still see the scene clearly. It seemed like part of everything else – a world not clearly divided, but entangled.

Later, my mother cut bunches of roses to fill the room. When I was in a position to have a garden of my own, I bought that shrub rose, and planted it. I too love old-fashioned English roses, but more than that, it is a living connection to an event I can’t forget and I can’t explain.