Dec 20 | The Green Robe (Letters from the Coast)

This photograph, to me, has always held the scent, the sight, the feel of Christmas. It’s a photo of my maternal grandmother, Gwendoline Hind-Smith, wearing a green robe with gold butterflies.

I don’t remember the story of the robe, but I know it was her favourite for years. The picture was taken in Philadelphia, where my uncle and aunt lived for several years with their daughters, at Christmastime. Granny had decided to come with us that year. She had broken both ankles slipping on an icy driveway not long before, an event I vaguely remember in clear but disjointed images, like a poorly edited filmstrip – looking over my shoulder to see Granny, supported on both sides by two male relatives and her feet dancing briefly before she went down; back inside, one ankle bleeding slightly and the other black and blue under the soft lamplight; later, two booties fastened with Velcro and propped up on a footstool at Uncle Patrick’s house…

And, of course, the green robe.

I always thought my grandmother terribly glamorous, and indeed that was an image she cultivated her whole life. She was born in 1917 and grew up one of five Irish sisters (as the family history goes). She always wanted a life of excitement and glitz, which was what brought her to Italy to study opera. The stories differ, but somehow she wrecked her voice – perhaps with a bad teacher, perhaps with the countless cigarettes she smoked, with the truth probably being somewhere in between (although my money’s still on the cigarettes).

This, of course, was in the ‘30s or ‘40s, so…you can imagine how that turned out. She ended up in the Women’s Auxiliary as a Junior Lieutenant and met my grandfather (fifteen years her senior and already married with children, but that’s a whole other story). They eventually settled down when the war was over, and my grandmother entered into the ‘50s as a mother of three – not an opera singer.

Memories of her are not as fresh as they once were, but are still tinged with a deep intimacy. She cared for me while my mum was working not long after my parents separated, and I still remember afternoons of drawing on her big easel, rummaging through her costume jewelry, and pretending to be “Mrs. Cat” coming to tea. I remember being called “baby lamb,” fed digestive biscuits, and naps in the odd dark space in back of her apartment behind the enclosed kitchen, with the ticking sound of an old fan a constant companion in the summer.

Her death, which was from lung cancer, was not unexpected, but it was still nearly impossible to fully absorb. My clearest memory is of understanding that she was not coming back, not ever, and how terrible and lonely that was. I think that that memory, that sense of loss and confusion at the impermanence of one so beloved, has done much to shape who I am today.

And yet, slipping this photo out from a pile of others at my mother’s dining room table one rainy November evening of this year, I felt an almost palpable surge of longing and love. It was almost like looking back across time and tasting, once again, that gigantic feeling that always accompanied the arrival of Christmas when I was a young child, that sense that magic was real and all around us, and perhaps that the gathered family, whatever its composition, was itself the conduit for such things.

I often tell people that I believe that elders, particularly those who suffer from dementia, do not so much lose their sense of time and memory as they begin to travel between worlds and across time. Perhaps first it occurs involuntarily, and then in death perhaps they voluntarily step out of the bodies that can no longer sustain them and take on a brand new unknowable form.

Contemplating the beauty of that remembrance of childhood wonder, I can’t help but think that this experience is rather like that, that I have been helped across the threshold for only a brief moment in time and find myself standing in my old/young child’s body, full of a child’s electricity and openness, but with all of the gratitude only an adult heart can feel.

What a gift.