Contributing something useful

I was wrapping some of my mother's birthday presents today when --

Well, let's put that into a more accurate perspective. I was intending to wrap some of my mother's birthday presents today, working on the assumption that we had wrapping paper in the house. It turns out that we have quite a lot of wrapping paper in the house, but it's all decidedly "Christmas" or "Congratulations!" themed. Really obviously so. You couldn't pretend it was birthday-present wrapping paper if you tried.

So, I rustled up some brown paper and started to do my old "brown paper packages tied up with coloured string" thing (it could be lazy and boring if it wasn't referential, inter-textual and quasi-chic). It turns out I also didn't have much by the way of coloured string, and it was all going to look really boring.

After wrapping the first one, I surveyed my rather poor options when this thought suddenly came to me:

If Nana was here, she'd tell you to grab her purse and walk up the street to the news agent to buy some decent wrapping paper.

So that's exactly what I did. Her purse was still where it's been for the last five or so years, and was chock full of coins she hadn't spent (or we hadn't spent for her) before she died. I grabbed it, walked up the road and off-loaded some loose change on four rolls of colourful, birthday themed wrapping paper.

It was a strange sensation, really. Over the last few years she has told me, on countless occasions, to grab her purse and walk up the road to by something or other. Traipsing up the street in the middle of the day with my grandmother's purse was something I used to do on a semi-regular basis before she went to hospital that last time.

I think it made her happy, yet strangely we had a thing about not letting her pay for things if we could do it for her. Not letting her pay was one way we showed our care for her... But thinking about it today, I realise we were just stopping her from showing her care for us.

My grandmother did things for us throughout her whole life. Practical, useful things, like cooking and doing the dishes and stuff like that. As she got older, we started doing those things for her. By the time she reached the stage where my mother moved in with her, there was very little she did while any of her kids were around - my mother and uncle did everything they could for her, and when I moved back home I joined in.

From being the person who is always doing something, always providing something, she became someone who contributed very little, and I think she felt that. For a while, she still tried to contribute something. In the mornings my mother would usually go to work just as Nana and I were getting up, so I'd make the two of us breakfast before I went to work. She used to tell me to leave the dishes for her, and I would. I knew, on a certain level, that doing the breakfast dishes (all four of them) and feeding the dogs lunch was her way to still contribute. My mother wasn't happy with this, though. She always frowned at me when she found out Nana had done the breakfast dishes again.

Eventually, she couldn't do them any more. I'd do the dishes in the morning, and my uncle would come over to feed the dogs. All she'd do was sit. But, occasionally, she'd tell her granddaughter to take her purse and buy something. Something for lunch. Something for the house. Something for someone's birthday. She never really cared what you bought with her money. When you'd bring it home to show her, she was almost completely disinterested. It wasn't the thing that mattered, you see, it was the fact that she had contributed it.

Far too often, we stopped her from doing that. At one point, she wanted us to buy a new freezer with her money, and we more or less decided we could keep going with the old freezer until after she died. Our reasoning (although I didn't entirely agree with it) was that she should have her own things around her as much as possible - we shouldn't move into her house and replace everything. But, looking back on it now, I think it would have made her happy if we had bought a freezer with her money. I think she would have liked to be able to walk past it and know it was something she contributed.

Back in her prime, a birthday in the family would be her thing to do, if you know what I mean? She'd co-ordinate the present buying and wrapping, she'd do the cooking, she'd host the dinner, she'd do the washing up... By the end, she didn't do a thing, really. And, what she tried to do, we'd take away and do "for" her. In the end, we were so busy trying to take care of her that we took away everything she could do to take care of us. That must have been so hard for her.

If I had thought about it, if I had acted on gut instinct instead of trying to do what a good granddaughter should do for her ailing grandmother, I would have asked her for more things. I would have asked her for little things that she could just give me - like coins for buying drinks, and I would have asked her if I could borrow things so that I could thank her for the loan later when I returned them.

How hard would it have been to say, "Nana, can I borrow some money to buy some stuff for work? I'll pay you pack after I've had a chance to get to the bank..."

Maybe it would have made her feel better. More like she was taking care or me. I don't know.

What I do know, deep down inside, is that it would have made her very happy to know I walked up the street today with her purse and bought some wrapping paper for my mother's birthday presents. My grandmother contributed something useful for her kids. That's something she definitely would have wanted.