Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Eight - Family Recounted In Departure/The Funeral

In 1980 Gran knew she was tired, and for different reasons than her being nearly eighty years old. Other people recognised the tiredness too. The culture she was part of was one where if you don't name an illness then you don't have it. If you don't go to the doctor then you are not ill. So when Gran saw her doctor she went because she was tired and went on her own. Later the family learned where she had been, but she resisted sharing what her doctor told her. The women in the family mostly kept female health matters to themselves. When my cousin told me 'The tiredness is from cancer' I decided whilst not consulting Gran. I felt that leading people in guessing games was the wrong. I ended the rumour mill by, when asked about it, using the proper word for what she had, and made sure that the relatives had heard the word clearly. If gran was disappointed by my use of the word 'cancer' with family, she would have been even more disappointed by her having the condition. But how to tell the truth about a situation when high status is confirmed by silence about personal matters? 

If Gran and Grandad had their free choice at the point I had thought to speak I would have been silent. As it was the two of them shut down any and all follow up conversation, however helpful or not it might have been. They were used to shutting down family talk that Gran found 'invasive', but it was too late. Gran had good reasons for shutting down further discussion, she had to gauge the help that would be helpful to her vs the helper she got seeking to help from where they might take advantage. She was right in her suspicions but unable to stop her helper making the advantage taken looking like matriarchal leadership.

Whoever had spread the rumour, including me, had a serious and awkward matter to consider with Gran's tiredness. What were the possible treatments? How much would they and grant the patient the autonomy that made them adults, when the cure would leave them tired and would most likely be temporary? As the matriarch of the family Gran valued her autonomy. She was born in an era when from the age of ten onwards to be fit meant being fit to work for the rest of your life, and work was labour intensive. Some old people got small pensions. Asking how the NHS treated cancer in the rural elderly circa 1980 was like asking about updates to rationing. Invasive surgery or tiring radium treatments were available in London hospitals. Gran's nearest big hospital was fifty miles away, in Nottingham. To attend there for treatment regularly from a small village, where the single local shop remained open but stocked relatively little, well, even Gran could see that what she hoped would extend her life might well more likely shorten it and reduce her quality of life where she was. Beyond medication for pain relief, the old had to take care of themselves. Particularly when, as matriarchs, they valued their privacy, and the independence they had from owning their own own homes.

At the time Gran confirmed her cancer, my relationship with my parents was somewhere between me being pliable and an awkward stand-off. My late teens had been difficult for them. My parents had endured several different attempts at self determination on my part, all of which they tolerated whilst what they really wanted was for me to get a job that would instantly make me middle aged and have no interests. Because for them interests did not make a person interesting, interests cost money and took time away from them running my life cheaply for me. They did not want me to be vegetarian, did not want me to be secretary of anything, least of all my local CND, and they definitely did not want me taking 'O' levels whilst on the dole. What they wanted me for me was an employer who would take over from them and further remove every idea I had, all drive, and any character that they had failed to remove in how they raised me. And for the employer to pay me handsomely enough for them to take control of setting me up on the property ladder. Not that they ever expressed their hopes for me in that way.

I regularly visited a friend whose parents were kind enough to him to give him a whole room for him to use as a music listening room and a place where his friends felt welcome. The parents themselves had no interest in music. The centre of Graham's music room was the hi-fi which was set up like a shrine with everything to play on it, tapes and LPs, either side. Corner lighting, scatter cushions and two big settees set against the walls of the room made it ideal. And the house was the end house of a terrace so no neighbours were disturbed by his playing music at volume. 

My last act of imagination was for me to buy a hi-fi like his, though I did not have the room that it needed to go in, or the friends to invite to share the music with. The hi-fi was very little of what I wanted, but it was what I could buy. That purchace was the last straw for my parents. When they learned how much I'd spent on the hi-fi they were shocked at how silently I had thought about it, done my research and made the purchase. By then my parents thought they had drained each other and me of initiative, and drained me enough for me to be find organising myself undoable. Shared houses for rent were rarely advertised. With my parents wanting me to be in well paid work and on the property ladder, rather than renting and on benefits, their utopian fantasy was becoming my anxiety nightmare. But I eventually did find a house to rent at short notice.

This was only part of the background in the personal conflicts I endured prior to mothers fantasy utopia-on-the cheap twenty first birthday party plans for me. I had completed a youth training scheme in which my trainer had moulded my training into me being part of his knocking shop, for his personal pleasure. The front was that the shop was a small independent carpet shop, which sold and fitted carpets. It was a good front, to hide how the biggest lie that he told himself was that he was a sex addict, and sex pest. Because of how I was brought up to be polite and a poor judge of character I came to think of him as 'a friend', for having so few friends. I could say now that every sex pest needs good cover, like claiming to be friends, to hide their appetites from themselves. But back then being used as a cover for other peoples opportunism and addictions seriously depressed me.

With my head bound by all those conflicts it was easy for the women in the family, mother cousin Heather and a few others to overlook me so easily as thy hatched their plan of having a garden party where Gran and Grandad had to be present as guests of honour, whilst the event was supposedly for me. This became the last of the family gatherings that Gran and Grandad attended. Gran who enjoyed being in a garden seat in the sun, amid the mild noise and pointless milling about. There was a stillness about her that day that was affirmative, which I would have appreciated more of, if only I could have screened out everybody else at the event. As it was I found the event excruciating. The best part was the relief of it being over. Gran and Grandad got out of the village they lived in less and less often after that party.

Four years after the cancer diagnosis, and fifty years after they bought it, Gran and Grandad sold their home, two workers cottages knocked into one, 'Maydene', and moved to one of the few first floor council flats for the elderly in the village. The house she was leaving had even been named after Gran, her first name being May, and still nothing was said observed about how the sale was a sign of an era closing. Perhaps less was said about the sale of the house because of the serious structural repairs that they had left undone over the years which it was beyond their strength and finances to arrange the repairs of. Nobody mentioned by how much the condition of the house must have reduced its sale price.

Alice, my mothers sister, was one of the few in the family who had a car and driver, in the shape of her husband Terry. Alice and Terry took it upon themselves to both move Gran and Grandad down the street, to their new flat, and to clear the house to make it fit for the sale. I only heard about the sale of the house and the move after it was all over. I had often found Alice to be secretive and high handed, and I been unable to say this out loud. When I heard about how Alice and Terry had cleared the house and furnished the flat with furniture etc from the house kept enough of what Gran and Grandad owned to furnish the new flat that they moved to, how much of the contents of the house they had dumped, whilst in the interests of 'efficiency' they cut mother out of the process by not telling her they were doing it, it seemed like Gran's secret fear had become a prophesy of what was happening to her. Mother would have caught even if she had been told and given a role in the move, she would like to have been invited to help but on the other hand, mother was a hoarder and would have been tempted to keep things out of sentiment she had no room for.

Nearly forty years on from the sale of Maydene, and nearly fifty years since I last visited there, I can say that I found the clutter of the house to be welcoming. The lower height of the doorways was 'quaint', the cool of the pantry under the stairs with the 'milk safe' at the back, the range, the rag rugs and comfy light armchairs in the living room all seemed friendly. Gran must have made the rugs, herself, when she and Grandad had moved into the house in the 1930's. If I could have saved anything and somehow found a future life for them, then the rugs are what I would have rescued.

But then I grew up being pre-judged within the family for falling on the sentimental side of materialism. When I liked an antique, then I liked it for it's aesthetic value and my connection with who it previously belonged to, more than the price it would raise in an auction. Without ever having had any discussion about the nature of religious faith Gran had, I somehow sought to follow what I thought was her path. Which was worth more than any material object she owned. I was the only one in the family to do so.130

The funeral went well. The church was full and the service was formal but simple. In the funeral oration it was revealed that however ill she was Gran had maintained her membership of The Mothers Union, and had achieved a record of sorts by being a member of it for seventy five years, after having joined at the age of thirteen. Though in the last ten years they had had to come to her much more than she lent her strength to them as a body. That day was not the day to say that such a record of membership was a statistic more than it was proof of commitment.

As the last hymn was sung, and before the final blessing from the vicar, through the polite words with friends and relatives, all slightly numbly expressed, I felt how fleeting time was. Funerals are not just markers for the passing of the lives of the  departed, nor are they merely times to reflect. Funerals are dramatic ways of closing chapters in the lives of the living that the living are wise to observe.

 Please left click here for Chapter Nine.