How do you write a eulogy for your champion?
I'd like to talk about my grandmother.
The Sharp Reminder of an Empty Space
I don’t really know how to write this, and to be honest, I’ve deleted it several times. I keep starting, then stopping, because committing the words to the page feels like acknowledging a future I desperately want to avoid.
My nan is still here, thank God, but spending those long, frightening hours with her in the hospital while she fought sepsis was a very sober, gut-punching reminder that 88 is much closer to the final curtain than it is to the opening act.
Nan has always been my favourite—even more than my Mum, which I know sounds terrible to say out loud, but it’s true. She’s my anchor. I’d call her at least once a week, telling her every mundane detail of my life. Even if it was boring — which, let’s face it, it usually was - she would listen, really listen, and tell me how happy she was just to hear my voice.
There was nothing I wouldn’t tell her, and nothing she wouldn’t hear. We’d speak on the phone for at least two hours, a feat no one else in the family could ever manage to stretch past five minutes. When I was a little boy she taught me how to dance. I was a clumsy kid with two left feet so she’d wmake me stand on top of her own, and then she’d lead the steps to the music playing softly on Radio 4. Grandad would watch from his chair in the dining room and then tell me all about the great dances they’d go to at the old music hall in our town, spinning these glorious black-and-white stories for me, and getting out albums of friends long since passed.
The fragility of her age really hit me at a wedding recently.
It wasn’t a gradual thing; it was a sudden, unwelcome awareness. Her balance was gone, and she had to hold my arm as we walked, her grip surprisingly weak. She kept getting confused, calling people different names all through the evening. I’d have to gently correct her, sometimes three or four times, but she wouldn’t realise she’d been getting it wrong. I’d asked family if this was becoming normal but a lot of them waved it off or didn’t want to take me seriously, a usual thing unfortunately.
The Battleaxe and the Private War
My experience of people from the 1930s are shaped by my grandparents. Both sides of them are or were intensely private, especially about their health. They don’t talk about illness; they treat it like a personal failing. We didn’t know for many years that Nan had been seeing a heart specialist because they were worried about her.
When I eventually found out and asked, I was instantly shut down, the conversation topic changed with a brisk finality. These weren’t questions for me to ask and nan was more open with me than anyone else. She didn’t want your fuss or your pity and you’d get snapped at if you pushed. That’s how I knew how serious it was when I was told she’d called family for help.
She’d once broken her leg in a fall but continued walking on it and doing the shopping. Grandad had locked her out of the house to force her to go to hospital with him.
She had to be in a cast for three months.
By the time my stepdad had arrived after she’d called, Nan was mostly yellow and could hardly move. She was quickly collected by an ambulance and admitted to a ward in our local hospital.
It was the first time in my life I had seen her look so utterly small. When I arrived, the whole family was there — my cousin handling the paperwork as power of attorney, my aunt, a retired registered nurse, stepping in where needed. The curtain was drawn around her bed, and I could hear commotion: they were trying to turn her and give her a wash. Nan herself was silent. The simplest and most accurate way I could describe her is a ‘battleaxe’ — a formidable, bossy, and fiercely capable woman. For her to be silent, to not protest the indignity of a wash, was terrifying and heartbreaking.
I spent every single day with her while I was home. I’d go over in the afternoon and stay at her bedside long past visiting hours. The nurses on the ward were so used to our family being there that we were never disturbed, never asked to leave. I gave her water, marked the charts to track what little she had eaten or drunk. In those early, desperate days, when she woke up and managed to speak, she looked at me and asked me to help her die. I felt like I’d been run over but I kept it all squashed into the core of me and told her to do better or I’d just keep talking at her and give her no peace.
That moment hurt in a way words can’t touch. I wiped her brow; told her she was doing better (she was) and that she needed to be patient. Nan doesn’t like her age being mentioned but I did, and she accepted that she was getting old and needed to accept the help she needed rather than try to push it away.
One night, I sat there as nan writhed in pain in her sleep, and I felt a single, hot tear begin to run down my cheek. I’d been on antidepressants for so long, and of course, nan had chosen to become this critically unwell right as I was tapering them off. I don’t know how I didn’t completely crack. I felt like an onion that had gained layers instead of losing them, hardened by the need to hold everything together. I quickly wiped the tear away and mentally scrunched myself smaller, making the feeling go away. I couldn’t be emotional. I couldn’t show her just how much this upset me. She needed to see me being strong; any less and I would have broken her in half when all she needed was a reason to hope.
The Champion I Will Lose
Towards the end of my time at home, nan started to do better. She still couldn’t eat anything solid, surviving only on calorie replacement shakes, but her colour had returned, and she was awake more often. Conversation was slow, but I was able to make her laugh, and eventually, she regained the use of her limbs. I’d been feeding her and giving her water, so seeing her able to lift a bottle to her mouth — even if she still couldn’t undo the lid felt like a monumental victory.
While I sat there, I had too much time to think. Nan was asleep a lot, and there were only so many times I could tidy the area or walk the hospital grounds. And the thoughts kept coming back to one unwelcome certainty: I knew I would be expected to write and deliver the eulogy if she died.
What do you write for someone who has been your absolute champion? I don’t fit my family, and I never really have. I’m the black sheep, the one who moved to London and lived around the world; when I come home, I feel like an alien in a working-class environment. What do you say about the one person who clapped for you when everyone else was ready to pull you down?
I don’t really know what I’m going to do without her. It frightens me to think that I won’t have a translator for my family, someone who talks me up when everyone else is prepared to talk me down.
What do you say about a woman like that? What words are enough?
I’m just not ready.