This year has been peppered with age milestones. My mum turned 75, my dad is soon to be 70, my wife Bella was 40 in July, and most recently my nan managed to reach 100. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. That feels ridiculous. When she was born, Lenin was still alive, the BBC had only been knocking around for a year and the Empire State Building didn’t exist. It’s a mighty feat. And because she’s been walking around on them for ages, she has mighty feet.
Nan suffers from quite bad dementia, but you can still hold an interesting conversation with her, albeit the same conversation over and over. And she’s still laughing, still able to delve into her own dusty archive and drag out a gem from the past. Recently, we spoke about her time in the Second World War when she made blankets with her friend Jessie and then quickly skipped around to a memory of seeing Frank Sinatra perform. “Is he dead?”, she asked. She then started singing “Young At Heart” which includes the line “if you should survive to 105, look at all you’ll derive out of being alive…”
Despite this moment being sweet and unexpected, as if she was 30 years old again listening to the radio, I couldn’t help but feel like it was tinged with melancholy. She’s there but not there. Nan but not nan. Schrodinger’s Nan.
Not the nan I remember from every school holiday spent in Weymouth, that’s for sure. The visits we made to see her and Grandad are still some of my fondest memories. Endless games, endless charging around and endless toasted cheese sandwiches. This is what she was famous for when I was eight years old: she had a toasted cheese sandwich maker and I couldn’t believe how great it was. It was worth the three hour drive just for one of those crispy, golden brown (butter both sides of the bread, remember) perfect pockets of delight. Nan’s toasted cheese maker was the running joke for as long as I can remember. I brought it up the other day. But life moves on, people change, memories fade, sandwiches get soggy and so do brains. She had no recollection of any of it.
Last weekend, everyone in her family got together to celebrate our matriarch (love saying that) and it was so much fun, but there was an undeniable overriding sadness. Nan didn’t really know what was going on or why so many visitors kept squeezing into her small front room. The whole thing must have been very confusing. She didn’t even realise she was 100 and had to keep asking me her age. (I kept telling her she was 400 and she’d pretend to slap me, she’s still got it!) Nan received a card from Charles and Camilla and couldn’t understand why. We had the beginnings of what felt like a comedy sketch as the mystery delivery only added to her disdain towards both of them for “how they treated Diana”.
We arranged a big family lunch at a place over the road from her flat just in case she fancied joining. As has been the way over the last couple of years, she hasn’t felt well or confident enough to leave her unbelievably hot home very often. It’s understandable. I don’t think I’d be arsed to do anything if I’d been alive for 36,000 days.
She didn’t fancy lunch overlooking the sea and definitely wasn’t up for an afternoon plunge in it afterwards. To be honest, you can’t blame her for that one. You’ve lived through a lot, you can do what the f**k you like. Plus it was pretty cold and due to the disdain greedy water companies have for our rivers and seas, all I could think about was that I might swim past the lunch I’d just flushed away.
Birthdays can be overwhelming. Life can be overwhelming. I find I sometimes get overwhelmed with how sad things can be. This was brought into sharp focus over that celebratory weekend. I’d spent some quality time with my mum and dad, asking them about their relationships with their parents. Only one of which (one hundred year old Joan) was still alive.
Dad spoke fondly about trips to the seaside he and his dad used to go on. The summer of 1966 was a particularly vivid memory of his. They drove from Witney to Weymouth in his dad’s Austin A40. The England vs. Portugal World Cup semi-final was on his portable transistor radio as the car rattled along, bound for the beach. Oddly enough, they slept in a car park on Lodmoor, which is now the site of a resplendent Premier Inn we all stayed at last weekend. The circle of life, in some small, mundane way.
He spoke fondly about the paraffin Primus stove that Gramps would boil a whistling kettle on in the morning before setting off to find a decent place for breakfast. Even more bizarrely, they both realised that they were probably in Weymouth at the same time as it was one of my mum’s parent’s favourite places to visit too. Obviously as kids, they didn’t know each other, but my mum recounted while on long brisk, bracing walks along the sea wall, how much her dad would love to live there. Several years later, he and Nan retired there, and there she has stayed. Funny how lives link up, isn’t it?
Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just how it is. Little moments are all pieced together to form the whole. And retrospectively it all somehow makes sense (and sometimes it makes no sense at all).
Clearly confused, I went for a run that evening and digested everything I’d heard. I loved learning new things about the two people who made me who I am. But the people who made them who they are, gave them those lovely memories, encouraged them to leave the small towns they both grew up in and go and better themselves, urged them to go on to further education, something that they couldn’t financially afford to do – those people were no longer alive. Or in my nan’s case, not the person they remember.
My parents are still not over losing their parents, and now they’re OLD too. It’s devastating in a way. I started laughing to myself, at the idea of some fantasy deity, (let’s call it the The Birth Wizard) sitting you down right before your life starts and giving you a taste of things to come:
“Right so,” begins the Birth Wizard, “before I let you grow and become a person, I just want to say that over hopefully the next 70 or 80 years, you’re going to experience lots of things. This will include delirious happiness and euphoria…”
“Sounds great!” you say. “Let’s get on with it!”
“But”, continues the Birth Wizard, “you’ll also experience the most devastating lows imaginable.”
“OK…That’s not ideal,” you reply, “but the good will out way the bad, right?”
“Not necessarily. Look, the good news is there is the potential to feel a love so strong that you’ll be unable to rationalise it. A love that will render everything that’s come before it redundant.”
“OK, great! Sounds good!”
“…But with that, all these people that you love with your whole being, that have made you who you are, have given you the most magical memories will all die. Everyone you love will die. If you’re lucky, you’ll watch your parents get old and die.”
“Sorry, how is that lucky?!…Urm…will I at least know when my favourite people will die so I can at least prepare?”
“No. Absolutely not,” replies the Wizard, solemnly.
“This seems unfair and cruel. And mad!”
“It is a bit, yeah,” says the Wizard, wistfully.
“And will I ever get over it?’
“No. You will not.”
“OK. I don’t want any of this.”
And you would be right to say that. If we knew what was ahead of us, we might say no thanks. But of course, this isn’t how it works. The Birth Wizard doesn’t exist, so we’re all just stuck with it. You can’t pick how it starts or how it ends, but you should grab hold of the middle and do what you can to make that joyful. You can, to a certain extent, alter those parts. The squishy, malleable parts.
Yes, you’ll be sad that things end but annoyingly, that stupid phrase is right. It IS better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. But only just. We can only do our best and hope that at the end, the good will have outweighed the bad. My nan might not be able to complete a cohesive audit of her life with such a muddled brain, but as I looked around the beach full of her family tree brought to life, you’d be in no doubt that she’d had a pretty good one. Sinatra would be impressed.
