'Come home.' My grandmother has been asking me to visit for months and I have been repeating the truth that I have no more leave from work this year. It is an easy truth, one that effortlessly disguise the other ones. 'Come home,' she repeats and this time it is an order. I freeze before giving in. 'Okay. I can come for Christmas.' I do not want to but the force of her words have wiped out any alternative.
I'm dying, are the words behind her latest request to visit. It is difficult to know if this is the truth. It is a truth certainly. She is getting older and more frail. Her cancer has not responded well to the first wave of treatments, but there is a gap between what the doctors say and what my grandmother interprets. I never hear what the doctor say.
We carry on our conversation. I show her the new kitchen sink, the growing tomatoes and cucumber in the garden. I delight over the young flowers that will grow into raspberries, and smile at the hazelnuts adorning the young hazel tree by the rampant strawberries. You taught me well, I want to say. It would be a lie. I spent my youth escaping her to play with my cousin in the barns of wheat and agricultural tools. You taught me well. The words refuse to be spoken even as truth hides deep below. I did not learn how to grow plants but I learned connection and desire for plants and food grown in a garden. To this day, I cannot eat chicken outside of my grandmother's place. The ones served in restaurants and at friends' houses have no taste or texture I can recognise. They have not been loved, killed and plucked by the same hand.
'It's hard you know. You have to give yourself a kick in the butt some days.' She tells me this over and over.
'It's okay. You can rest.'
'It's hard you know.'
I nod. I know. This woman has never sat down for more than fifteen minutes for as long as I've known her. I suspect movements and activities are her ways of coping with life. She has rarely talked about herself with me but the glimpses I have amassed over the years hint at a life she did not want. Born in the 1930s in rural France, she never had a choice but to become the wife of a farmer, a mother of children, a fixture in a house to cook and clean and love.
'They want to take my bladder out, give me one of those external plastic bags.' A pause. 'I don't mind. I told the doctor all I want is to still be able to drive.'
She does not go anywhere these days. She refuses to drive further than the supermarket and whichever local church holds the service of the week. This is not what she means. I couldn't wait to get my driving licence, she told me once about her youth. There was such pride and fire in her eyes at remembering her first car. She was able to escape, to go places without the constant eyes of others. I don't know much about her life. What I imagine is likely a mixture of her truth and mine, but this much I know: her driving licence is more important to her than anything else. It's the one thing that has always been hers and hers alone, the one thing she has desired for herself and got for herself.
'You'll be able to,' I respond, neither truth or lie.
'You will come?' She hesitates this time. I have dodged the question too many times before, wriggling my way out of it in endlessly creative way. It hurts to hear it reflected back at me.
'Yes.' I do not hesitate, I do not avert my gaze. Yes, I will come.
We hang up.
'My grandmother is dying,' I tell my partner as I put my phone away. 'I think.'
'You okay?'
'I'm not sad. It's odd. I never thought of her dying before.' I am struck by my own words. For most of my life I have considered the death of every individual in my family. I learned late that this is an odd thing to do, but it has been my way to soothe certain anxieties. If I made plans for the death of loved ones, then I would be able to cope when it happens. This of course makes no sense and I know it. I've always known it. Still, it quietens the raging voices of fear and loneliness. Yet I have never feared the loss of this grandmother. She is the mother of my mother and she has always been alive.
My paternal grandmother died when I was in high school but she had been unwell for years previously. Her husband, my paternal grandfather, died before any of his grandchildren were born. I know nothing about him, not even his name. My maternal great grandfather died in my first year living in the UK but I had said my goodbyes already, his days mostly spent alseep by then. My maternal grandfather died a few years ago but he had been frail for a long time, every return visit a goodbye I made over and over. But my maternal grandmother? She surely cannot die.
She has never been frail. On every visit, she has been busy around the kitchen, harvesting in the gardens, feeding the chickens, ironing and folding laundry, visiting friends. She has grown slower to the point of taking a rest after lunch, but that has been it. She has always flown and buzzed in my memories. She still does. Except that she does not. I am simply not there to witness it.
'She's always been there, you know.' I stumble on the words. 'Like... she's just always been there.' I repeat unable to find any other way to express what I mean.
I do not know how to articulate yet what her loss would be. She is not gone and I am not going to mourn her whilst she is alive, but the idea of her death weasels into my being. When she is gone what will be left of my family? What will happen to the gatherings around the dining table and later the jars of food in the boot of cars? What will hold the fraying links between us all? What of my memories?
I spent every week-end of my childhood in her house, running amok in the gardens and barns of the property with my cousin or hiding away behind a sofa with a book. I grew to dislike the place that could make my mother so angry, the place I could never be myself in but was instead the good child that was doing so well at school. 'She's studying art history at university, you know. Yes only 17.' I wanted to scream at them and demolish the house, burn all the fields with the same intensity that I wanted to farm them. Eventually I made peace and learned to let go of the ghosts of my past selves populating every corner of the property with memories of joy and sadness, of togetherness and loneliness. Soon, this house will no longer be mine. My aunt will probably claim it as hers or it will be sold or rented, but whatever happens to it, it will change. I will lose the last bastion of my childhood. Is it what growing up is? The gradual eroding loss of everything that shaped you and brought you to the place you are in now?
I turn the computer on and check Eurostar train tickets for the Christmas holiday. I bristle at the idea of a train packed with families, screaming children, heavy coats, and far too much luggage. I stare at the price to deflect the sensory discomfort that creeps below my skin. It's a better price than I was expecting but still higher than I would like to pay. Still. This is part of my choice to live in a different country, to flee so far away, returning home takes a full day of international travel. I do not put any ticket in the basket. I need to talk to my mom first and arrange for pick up points, organise an agenda for the holiday. Are we going to be spending Christmas with my grandmother? Are we all, aunt, uncle, and cousins gather at her place? Will I meet my cousin's wife and toddler for the first time? We've been so used not to gather for the holidays, each celebrating in our own houses, quick calls made to clink glasses on screens and share thanks for gifts exchanged via the postal service. When was the last time we gathered as a family? I cannot recall. It would have been more than ten years ago. Would it have been to mark my departure to London? No. It would have been before then. I can only recall the photos neatly arranged in my family albums recording large parties. Tables in the barn cleared of dust and tools for a week-end were too long to fit in one photograph. A sheep browned and blackened from the large fire over which it roasted. Adults were peppered around tables and standing in the gardens, glasses of alcohol in hand, laughing and talking. Children were blurs, running free from all rules for a few hours. Those images are more than a quarter of a century old by now, long gone memories I remember via images. It hits me then how we've been fragmented for a long time, my grandmother providing a semblance of unity by keeping us all updated on each other's lives. She has been the communal link to us all, the person we all rotate around as we spiral further and further from one another. Maybe this is why I never imagined her death? I would have been forced to face the loss of more, the truth of the tensions that run deep between the older generation in my family, tensions that rippled onto us, the children now adults and estranged.
It is not my grandmother dying I fear, it is the final loss of the family we once were. I could still hold a breath of life in those memories, feel the presence of my cousin I once spent every week-end hours with, walk within the walls of the house and the boundaries of the village in the glow of the past. But no longer. I am letting it go. All of it. The strange thing is, it does not hurt and I am not sad. I am relieved? Maybe. A part of me is for sure. There are a lot of tears and pain in those memories. But they are just that, memories, weightless and inconsequential. None of the new generation will share in the memories of long summer evenings under the veranda, empty plates of food all around, us children almost out of energy, the adults slow and lethargic too. Days when I was too young to see that this happiness, this illusion of family was in part smoke and mirrors.
I let out a breath as the computer screen turns to black.