Inheritance

My mother’s mother, Florence, died when she was 51 and Mum was 17, thirteen years before I was born. Yet I have never not known her. Ever since I can remember I heard stories of her, there were photos of her in the house, always elegant, whether it was a studio portrait or a snap of her picnicking on a indeterminate fellside. She had been a loving mother, to all four of her children, made them feel as safe during the tempestuous family life with her husband as she did after their divorce. She had a beautiful voice, as well as being a dedicated piano player. What she lacked in cooking skills, she made up for in sharing her love for reciting poetry and stories of her favourite flowers and trees. Her physical absence was filled by her spiritual and emotional presence.

She was more vivid and real to me, through my imagination, than the grandmother who lived in the same time as us, who we saw several times a month. Perhaps it was because she was made flesh by the combination of Mum’s memory and my imagination that her existence was so tangible to me. Her curtailed life, Mum’s desire for her to have lived longer and my fevered animation of how she might attend to my needs, created a life force that exceeded any singular body.

I carried this energy, alongside her various, always fun, creative and loving, interventions in my daydreams. She shaped herself into some intangible part of my body as an imperative to live life to the full, and to have no regrets if I was suddenly struck down or told I was going die tomorrow. When I was thirteen or fourteen I eschewed my bed, to sleep only on a mattress on the floor in preparation for having to sleep anywhere on my extensive travels that I planned to take as soon as I was old enough. Until then, I’d read books as rapidly as I could turn their pages, to be sure to inhabit all those that populated the shelves of our house. This meant an eclectic consumption of my brother’s science fiction, Florence’s own volumes of Conrad and Somerset Maugham that Mum had kept, and my Dad’s copies of James Thurber and the anthologies of the cartoons of Giles and Andy Capp. On our weekly trips to the library I would borrow all six books I was allowed on my ticket, regardless of whether I read them or not. When not reading I’d make elaborate things from shells, cardboard boxes or scraps of material or occupy grubbier worlds at the foot of trees or in puddles in the building site next door. Life existed everywhere and I was going to experience it.

The downside to this drive was a frenetic need for efficiency, to be able to fit everything in. I would write out my shopping lists into the order in which I would walk through town. I had other lists of things I wanted to achieve, of maybe ten of fifteen things that I’d expect to finish within a day rather than the week that a more tempered approach would take. To sleep on an unfinished jobs list was a fundamental discomfort to me, that often would lead to my waking in the early hours ordering the activities to complete the following day.

The complication of this efficiency drive comes in relation to creative endeavours. I remember asking a friend how she managed an efficient writing practice. I can still see the look of horrified bemusement on her face in the place of a vocalised answer. Creative work is perhaps the antithesis of efficiency, or at least the creative work I most enjoy, the meandering, the slow observing and processing, the almost aimless gathering of that which intrigues, the slow rising of form and meaning.

This urge for productivity, thankfully and possibly inevitably, loosened when I was 51. It’d been that year when I first connected my unspoken time deficit to Florence’s premature death. I forgive myself for not realising how these two things mapped onto each other. I’d heard of this anticipatory momentum from friends who’d experienced the early death of parents, but hadn’t considered it in my non-lived experience of Florence’s death. It had not been my grief, but only ever a story to me. I hadn’t even known her. This had meant I could dismiss the weight of its impact, not realising that in the realm of emotional nourishment, the umbilical cord is never cut. I’d been absorbing its truth with every cell of my body, hence living it. And ironically probably too busy to allow myself to connect the dots. The work continues to shake myself free of it. Another story to tell is that life, any speed of life, post Florence’s death, is a bonus, and can be lived as such in honour of her.