My Granny is a wonderful person. She is caring and supportive, and has always made conscious efforts to be better at helping others, finding new ways to care for them, and giving emotional nourishment wherever she’s seen it missing.
Originally in this piece, I referred to her by her name, Penny, because she is so much more than simply the parent of my parent. But who she is to me is Granny. So that’s what I’ll say.
Granny has always been there for people when she could be, and very often, even when she couldn’t, occasionally draining her own emotional reserves to help refill someone else’s.
She is a deeply loving person, and the effects of her actions are clearly visible in her children and grandchildren: They are wonderful people who you feel proud to know. Perhaps they don’t realise realise how good they are, but I’ll bet they know why.
I was speaking with one of her sons, my uncle Alistair, walking back to our Airbnb, having one of our many long, deep talks during our first family holiday [a couple of years ago]. I noted how his words were leaning towards the liberal and progressive, with his desire to share his freedoms apparent in his approach to life, and told him how his ideas form the basis of much of mine.
I said, it was people like him who set the groundwork for modern concepts of support. Those which are now accepted as commonplace, thanks to the value they have been shown to have by him, and others like him. That underlying empathy, which first propelled his own ideas, has now entered the common stream of consciousness.
For example: when I was younger, having “mental health issues” was not a thing. There wasn’t even a word for it, and people who struggled went, unwillingly, against the trends of the time. It just wasn’t talked about, and if you suffered, you kept it to yourself. But gradually, we collectively gained a deeper awareness of the matters of the minds of others, and through that, a deeper compassion too. Now, to deny support for such issues is to go against the grain instead. We’ve accepted the importance of taking care of each other’s mental well-being, and in doing so, have made the world a lot nicer for everyone; not just for those whose minds work against them, but for those who love those people too.
I told Alistair that people like him form the bedrock for people like me, and the modern freedoms I now have. And he corrected me: Actually, he said, he is not the bedrock. No, it’s his mum, and his brother Owen, who really are. They are the ones who set the foundations. They are the ones who laid the brickwork and balanced the beams; who configured the wiring and checked it for safety; who paved the floor upon which we now walk.
And I understood exactly what he meant. I can’t see it as completely as he can, myself being a person who had to bodge together their own construction: whose beams were built wonky; whose wiring was unsafe; whose paving was unstable. But that’s where Granny met me.
—
She came inside my scattered home — inside this haphazard, half-constructed mess of a self-shelter — and she set to work. Quietly, she re-set the foundations, replacing the fractured concrete, which barely held things together, with something new, something solid. The changes she brought were not radical, but they were, as she had identified, necessary.
I didn’t know it at the time, she drew no attention to herself, and I don’t know if even she know what she was up to. The best kind of support, after all, is intuitive: you have a goal to give someone the freedom you think they deserve, but you try not to think about the “how”, because everyone is different. You simply try to help, and hope that when you’ve done what you can, they might be better off for it.
And now, here I am, at the half-way point of my life, understanding the meaning of “self-comforted” for the very first time. To summarise the metaphor: She laid new foundations within me, finally giving me stable ground, providing me with the freedom I needed to build myself into something better… into a person I like being.
I’m not perfect, and I never will be — but I can accept that now. At the start of the holiday, Granny told me that I was going to have to get used to being adored. I have reflected frequently on this, and looking at these wonderful people I do indeed adore, I’m still baffled that the depth of my adoration for them might actually be reciprocated. That these people, my family, who I look up to immensely, might see past the flaws I’d always felt made me, and accept them as part of who I am — coming together within the universe that is the rest of me, forming a person worth caring about, worth loving. I finally understand: A weakness is just another way for someone to love you.
—
With my house in order, I was able to emerge into the space we share as a family. The holiday was a ground-breaking experience for me, each member of my family showing new ways our own internal homes could be built, carrying the weight which they could hold comfortably and proudly, but — a new experience I witnessed: sharing the load of that which is too heavy for one person to bear alone. Without guilt, without debt.
And that’s when I realised the most beautiful thing about us: We are not a series of single, solitary homes, trying our best to survive, on our own against the elements. Instead — I am reminded of a phrase a wonderful Irishwoman once told me, “it takes a village to raise a family”.
That’s what we are. We’re a village.
And now, since coming away from the holiday, I feel part of that village still within me. Through that, and through the experiences I was able to have during that wonderful shared week of our lives, I’ve gained the fundamental tools I needed to escape dark, barely-inhabitable realities, and find life in new universes. Ones that are built on principles of trust, acceptance, and compassion.
I could not be the person I am now without her help, and I feel like the luckiest grandson in the whole world.
—
I have been writing, in this introspective, personal style, for at least 20 years. I have practised constantly, pushed myself to try new avenues of expression, dove deep into my sincerity in the name of better understanding who I am, what I feel, and why. Through support from people I trust, I have accepted that, actually, perhaps I’m rather good at it. But it’s not really something I’ve learnt. It just flows out of me: I simply write, and something happens.
Likewise, you just happen. Just as a wave retreating from a beach leaves it covered in tiny, infinite, sun-glistened diamonds, so too do you leave your presence in the world. Perhaps you can’t see it yourself, but it’s there, its known, and it’s appreciated.
And while I have the words to express the feelings captured here, I am not the only person who feels them. Thoughts and emotions are vastly complex things, whose richness can barely be explored with mere letters and grammar alone. However many hours one may practise transcribing these raw flows, however close we come to translating the depth of our soul, language is inherently limited. So I hope you’ll believe me when I say: We are grateful to Granny in ways that words cannot explain.
—
I’ve talked a lot here about the nourishment and encouragement that Granny has provided to us (and the powerful, perhaps previously unspoken effects that this has had). But I’d also like to say that Granny is, of course, much more than the support she gives. She’s also lovely to be around. She’s interesting, insightful, and very funny — and a person with flaws and weaknesses she can call her own, and which only make us love her more.
I hope that, in some way, I can share something similar to the kindness that Granny has shared so freely with me. Honestly, I don’t know if I could ever give other people what she’s given me personally: chiefly, an appreciation for myself; an internal self acceptance; and most importantly, a sense of belonging. But I’ll do what I can, and hope that in the end, they might be better off for it.
Thank you Granny. I love you more than I could ever express.
last edited: 2023/07/01