Healing Hands – Elton John 1989

 I took this photo earlier this year when in Sydney for the 87^th birthday of my Gramma. Apart from my own birthday, being with her for this, given her recent health, somewhat unexpected milestone was the main reason for the trip. I’ve left Australia and said goodbye to her for what I thought was forever, three times now. With a bit of luck, I’ll do it all over again in four months.

Everyone has grandparents, some more than others. I had three that I knew, one having died before the family’s mass migration from the murky Midlands to sunny Australia, but one to whom I am especially close, my maternal grandmother. And like most children, I spent many holiday weeks with her as a child, learning the lost arts of her generation like cooking a cake from scratch, home kitchen gardening or just about anything involving a needle. 

I wonder what I would teach my grandchildren? How to use a mouse? How to spell in English not text? How to play with actual Lego? How to play with a Barbie Doll rather than dress like one? How to read a book that you hold in your hand and are required to physically turn the pages of? Anyway, I digress…

She taught me how to knit, how to take the bottoms up on a pair of pants (dad was a shortarse) how to make plain cake, how to cut patterns (I never quite mastered sewing it all together like my sister did) and how to make perfect coleslaw. Motherbear will argue this point, but Gramma also taught me how to boss others around, how to organise anything into military precision and how to clean all visible flat surfaces and hide mess in a cupboard when guests arrive. She taught Motherbear that last one too.

Or maybe the similarities lie in the fact that like me, Gramma is an Aries. She gave me a silver ram pendant that had once been hers when I was about 10 yrs old. I remember not really understanding what it meant at the time, I was just incredibly proud that I had something special of Gramma’s; something precious that one of her other 12 grandchildren did not get.

These hands, today so contorted and worn, blinged up by the rings we gave her as a birthday present, once washed me, clothed me, wound my hair into ringlets when we were dressed up for the Bicentennial celebrations in Sydney and smacked me across a swimming-costumed bottom when I misbehaved. Her hands also sponged white vinegar onto a violently red sunburnt back; purportedly to relieve the pain, or perhaps to cause a sting to remind little children of the great benefit of sunscreen in a country plagued by skin cancer. Dozens of which she has had removed from her own heat blasted skin.

Her hands suffered a disease causing the shortening of her tendons. I believe that this disease, like another that cost her a good part of the use of her feet, are the result not of a random cell dysfunction, but always hardworking and admiring those who worked like she did, the outcome of total overuse. Even when she sat still at night to watch television, her hands remained active, knitting covers for clothes-hangers that she would sell on to someone in need of coloured and padded, rather than the off the rack (pardon the pun) variety most people use, or painting her nails or setting her curls, or combing the knots out of a little girl’s long and matted beach-dried hair.

She cared for no one more than for her own husband, who 8 years older than she, would die of Alzheimer’s long before her own memory started to fade. For 5 years, she took increasing responsibility for even his most basic of needs; always groaning about how hard it was, and worrying when he disappeared without a trace, but doing it all the same. Because that was what she did, take care of things.

And then you grow up.

As a teenager, after a particularly ridiculous demonstration of the effects of Ouzo on a 17-year-old human anatomy, I returned home with an even more ridiculous neck. I’ll spare you the details, but the fact was I could not go to school looking as I did, and so mum packed me off to Gramma’s, as she had done during many a school holiday for years before.  Despite having behaved like a juvenile, I remember this as being the time where in her eyes at least, I went from granddaughter, to young woman. We didn’t talk about what happened, but even still, she proudly trucked me around the retirement village, showing off one of her 13 treasures, but only after carefully applying her best pancake makeup to hide the evidence of such an obvious crime.

Years later still, she would sit proudly in the front row of the Great Hall at the University of Sydney, beside her younger brother, golden robed as a doctor of the University, and my parents, to watch her first grandchild graduate. I black robed and flat-hatted and she wearing her finest that always includes earrings and pearls and the perfect smile of false teeth and a daily application of Red Lipstick.

On my last trip south, her health heading in the same direction, she needed to go into hospital. Our roles reversed, it was my hands that would take the lead, helping her up and down and into and out of her chair, providing the lost strength and dextrous skill that she had once given me. Interestingly, her mind is not so far gone as to notice a shiny something that she wants, and it would be the first of many days, that she would try, and fail, to get that red ring off my hand, and onto her own.

I hope very much to see her again soon, for what may be the last time, again, or not, again. Her mind has withered, and her body refuses to hold her up straight like it used to, but somewhere inside of that cloudy mind, there is still a sparkle in her eyes, a sparkle that recognises me still, a sparkle not yet outshined or outlived by those god-awful rings.

Comments

[motherbear]

Beautiful

[AG]

AG and Big Al are in tears - not unusual!