I had never been a pallbearer before.

We walked her body slowly to the front of the chapel, me quietly humming an old Josephine Baker tune I’d had in my head for days as a sort of comfort blanket – something to keep me focused. It seemed only months since we made that final impossible trip from Cairo, in fact a year ago; that Kafkaesque last night we spent there with the sole intention of getting her out.

From the moment we’d arrived, it was apparent that her deteriorating condition had left her with no idea of who my father I were, denying all knowledge of requesting him to come and take her back to the UK where she could be cared for. That last night, loud party music that thumped over the tall palm trees from across the square, prowling mosquitos and an unbearable heat took all hope of sleep from us as we dozed, already with one eye on the front door in case she would try and escape (in her confused state she had taken to walking the streets of Garden City at night). In the end I spent the remaining few hours before dawn in the kitchen with her carer, smoking coarse cigarettes and drinking strong tea, me speaking in broken Arabic and her in similarly few words of English. My father instead chose to stand on the balcony and scowl in futility at the source of the loud music. At around four in the morning the taxi arrived, and she left her home on Hod El Laban Street for the last time.

If that final night was a night in Hell then the flight home was the long slow trip back over the Styx. She had always had a phobia of flying so it was perhaps fortunate that her condition left her with no or little idea of where she was – “Why are we just sitting here?” she huffed irritably several hours into the flight. As the flight went on she became more agitated: grabbing anyone who went past regardless of whether they were cabin crew or passengers; fiddling with her seatbelt during descent. I can’t give enough praise to the cabin crew on that flight – they could instantly recognise the situation and how exhausted my father and I were. They moved us up to club class when my father mentioned my grandmother’s claustrophobia and increasing agitation, and sat and talked with her when she nabbed them as they passed, listening to her rambling very patiently and asking her if there was anything she wanted. “A cup of tea, please,” my grandmother would always reply. They were too polite to mention the increasing number of stone cold cups of tea already in front of her and always brought her another with a smile. I regret not writing that thank you letter to them. They were wonderful.

After she arrived back in the UK she at some point contentedly surrendered to her condition and lived out her final days well cared for and in comfort, in a nursing home close to my father in Crickhowell. Her eccentrically austere ‘British School ma’amishness’ was certainly a change from the usual sleepers nursing homes typically comprise. In fact, she blissfully believed the staff attending to her were paid servants and she the owner of the large house. On one occasion she remarked petulantly to the manageress, “I really don’t know why I don’t have you fired.” When she complained the hallways were dusty (they weren’t) they issued her with a feather duster. The night staff would often see her walking the corridors, giving the occasional picture frame a quick, petulant flick of pink feathers before disappearing down the hall. Whenever a new resident was brought to the home, my grandmother, as “hostess” was apparently the first to befriend them, making sure they didn’t feel alone or overwhelmed and standing at the door to the manageress’s office tapping an empty cup and saying “tea!” over and over, nodding in the direction of the new resident with a polite but firm smile.

Barely a year later, my grandmother died peacefully in her sleep in the early hours of the 3rd of February 2010. Three, two, one, zero. She was 88 years old. In a way she was the last link to the grandfather I never got to know in life; a distant part of my family history now gone forever, remembered only through grubby photographs and hazy childhood memories of summers spent with them both in the Gower.

But of course, despite her good health and the excellence of her care, anyone who has experience of senility or dementia will tell you how heartbreaking it is to see a piece of the person you care for disappear that little more each day, even further beyond the point where they have no idea who you are. It is as if they are embalmed first with death occurring as a mere sidenote. I will never forget the moment where, during one of her fits, I asked her if she knew who I was and she angrily replied that “of course” she didn’t. It was like a kick to the stomach. By habit you wrap each memory in vellum as you discover it is something else they have forgotten. I felt this keenly with my grandmother who possessed the sharpest, keenest intellect in any human being I have so far encountered. It all just seemed so unfair.

A former Classics teacher, she had an encyclopedic knowledge of apparently all literature, from Aeschylus to Amis. She was fluent in French and Italian and could read Latin and Ancient Greek. After my grandfather died, she stayed on in their apartment in Cairo permanently, speaking Arabic with a spectacularly inappropriate cut glass RP accent. She travelled all over the world during a time when few could. Her intellect meant that she could see straight through you to the point of undeniable telepathy. On one occasion, she abruptly followed a whimsical discussion on Cricket by asking me “do you have a boyfriend yet?” without so much as a pause or change in tone. I had to choke down my tea to stop myself from coughing it across the room.

She lived through things that are considered surely immemorial to myself, and those likely to be reading this, from the stupendous to the trivial. Things that have shaped our society and form an everyday part of the background to our lives were once topical events for people of my grandmother’s generation. From the date she was born:

• the Russian Civil war was at its peak
• Insulin was discovered
• the lie detector invented
• the first talking movie screened
• Time magazine was founded
• the first Olymic Winter games took place
• Winnie the Pooh was published
• Houdini died
• the BBC was founded
• Bubble Gum was Invented
• the first Mickey Mouse Cartoon was screened
• the first Oxford English Dictionary was published
• Penicillin was discovered
• sliced bread was invented
• Wall St crashed
• Pluto was discovered
• Amelia Earhart flew her solo flight across the Atlantic
• the atom was split
• the cheeseburger was created
• King Edward abdicated
• The Golden Gate Bridge was built
• the Hindenburg disaster took place
• the helicopter was invented
• Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany
• World War 2 broke out
• Winston Churchill became Prime Minster
• Mount Rushmore was completed
• the T Shirt was introduced
• ballpoint pens were introduced
• microwave ovens were invented
• the United Nations was founded
• atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier
• Polaroid cameras were invented
• the Big Bang theory was forumlated
• Israel was founded
• China became communist
• NATO was established
• the first modern Credit Card was introduced
• the first organ transplant took place
• the first “Peanuts” cartoon strip appeared
• the Polio vaccine was created
• seatbelts were introduced
• Queen Elizabeth II was coronated
• DNA was discovered
• Hillary climbs Mount Everest
• cigarettes are first linked to cancer
• James Dean was killed
• McDonald’s was founded
• the TV remote control was invented
• Velcro was introduced
• Dr Suess published The Cat In The Hat
• The EEC was established
• Russia launched Sputnik
• Kennedy was assassinated

… and that only brings us up to 1963.

She was an ‘ordinary person’. There is no shame in being an ‘ordinary person’. Ordinary people do extraordinary things. There is no such thing as an ordinary person.

There were only six of us at the funeral to say goodbye to close to a century of human experiences; myself, my father and my father’s partner as well as some staff from the nursing home. My grandmother had outlived her husband, her brother and nearly all of her friends. What a strange thing it is to live in a world where everyone you know is younger than you.

It was a typical, if brief, Welsh affair; one hymn, a reading from a passage in Ecclesiastes we’d found marked in my grandmother’s Bible and I read a Dylan Thomas poem. This too seemed appropriate – though my grandmother was a fan, my grandfather apparently once met Dylan Thomas and thought him pompous and arrogant. Even in death they continued to disagree. In Wales, you’re generally known by your profession, so my father’s village is populated by characters such as “Dave the milk”, “Colin the meat” or “Mike the news”. My father is even good friends with the man who runs the local shoot, who is perhaps alarmingly known as “Roger the pheasant”. The funeral itself was organised by “Ron the box”. My dad said he chose him over the other option because Ron was a “local” boy. Anyone familiar with the modern use of the word ‘local‘ will understand how surreal I was beginning to find all this. I asked him who the other option was. “Ted the dead,” he replied glibly.

It was all over very quickly. I remember saying ‘goodbye’ as I caught the last glimpse of the coffin. We said our farewells to the staff, some of whom were in tears. One of them gave me her watch which they’d found in her room. Attached to it was the key to her flat in Cairo – a sort of comforter to her perhaps. I looked at the watch, noticing that the hands had become loose and fallen away, perhaps long ago. The metaphor was all a bit too apparent: a watch that no longer told the time with a key to a home she no longer lived in. It all reminded me a little too much of a short passage I previously wrote, ironically one of the last times I was in Cairo, on the things we hold onto in life and how they shape our purpose. Is a key to a house that no longer exists still a key? Do we still truly exist when we lose the attributes that define us?

Though they go mad they shall be sane.

As we took the road home to my dad’s house, I started humming that same tune again, absently. As I looked up, it was only then that I remembered the name. I later found out the song was written only a few years after my grandmother was born. One verse went around and around my head like a scratched record as we cut through the Welsh countryside – flanked by green fields shaking off the recent snow under a vast, endless canopy of light blue.

Blue days
All of them gone
Nothing but blue skies
From now on

Beryl Jones; 1921-2010

• This entry was posted on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 11:57 am and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.