During the Day

I've been at home during the working day a fair bit lately while working on my thesis. For some reason, especially when it's nice and sunny outside, being in this house in the middle of the day on my own has got me thinking about my grandmother. I guess I'm just feeling her a little bit. I don't know.

When I was in pre-school, my grandmother used to take care of me in the afternoons while my mother was at work. Then, during school, I'd often spend large chunks of the school holidays here. When I was at university, and later when I was working part-time as a teacher, I would occasionally come over for lunch with Nana. When my mother sold the house I ostensibly grew up in to move in with my grandmother, I didn't really feel as if the family home had been sold, because this had really always been the family home. Even though this was never my house, exactly, while growing up, it was always one of my homes - and my grandmother was a permanent fixture. It's really only been the last two years that you could be in this house during the day without her being here.

I should be used to having the place to myself now. After all, I moved in four years ago (to save rent and help take care of the old duck), and grandmother moved out about two years ago. And yet, still, when I'm here during a 'working' day and it's sunny outside, it seems weird that she isn't around.

When she went to hospital the last time, we knew she probably wasn't coming back - but we kept everything ready for her just in case she did. Then, when she was accepted into a nursing home, we still kept everything ready for her for a couple of months (just in case she got kicked out), before 'relaxing' into the new 'normal' and starting to treat the house as if it was ours, rather than hers. One of the first things that happened was we got rid of her terrible old bed (we'd been trying to get her to replace it for years) and then I moved into her room. It made sense - after all, she was never going to use it again, and my bedroom was hot and stuffy. All the same, we never mentioned this to her.

Everything was moved, shifted around, altered slightly. A few things were replaced. The chairlift was taken out so someone else could have it... And I stole my grandmother's bedroom. I used to have a recurring nightmare that they had managed to “fix” her, and we were expected to pick her up and take her home the next day. It wasn't a nightmare because my grandmother was coming home, but rather because of the “Oh, crap, we've completely stuffed up her house!” element. For a few months after she died, I kept having the same dream. Only this time it was slightly augmented by the “Hey, we started chucking out all of your clothes and things after the funeral because we thought you were dead” aspect.

For some reason, today I was thinking about how she would have preferred to die. Not like she did, I can tell you. I'm reasonably sure she would have preferred to die a good six or seven years ago. She would have gotten up from her old, favourite chair (a little shaky in the knees, but still mobile), walked into her kitchen (where she spent a lot of her life, cooking for her family), and rinsed out her cup and things at the sink while looking out through the kitchen window at her backyard. Then she would have walked down the hallway (without needing any help), used her own toilet (without any accessories), washed her hands in her own bathroom and then gone to her own bed for an afternoon nap. There, surrounded by the things that have been a part of her life for the last thirty to fifty years - the things she once shared with her husband, and were as familiar to her as breathing - she would have gone to sleep and simply never woken up. That's how her husband died, and that's how she wanted to go.

I wish we could have given that to her. The trouble with nursing homes is that, no matter how nice or comfortable they are, they always feel like a cross between a hotel and a hospital. My grandmother “lived” at hers for almost a year, and never felt “at home”. I'm almost entirely convinced that's why she slept so darn much (well, that and the painkillers) - because her dreams would take her home. She'd wake up and tell us to take the washing off the line, or remember to get something from the kitchen on our way home... I hope that's where she slipped to, in the end. Dreaming herself back into her kitchen, looking out at her backyard - just as I'd seen her so many times over the years. It would be nice to think that, in some small way, she managed to die at home after all.