Granny Nora by Sue Berman

​Sue works as an oral historian for Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. She is passionate about amplifying lesser told stories. Sue is a daughter, sister, mother and partner. In her down time, she likes to play scrabble and take walks in nature.
 
Lockdown Level 4 – Thursday 21st April
 
Within the first couple of weeks of lockdown level 4 we began a new and extended walking route, one that took us past the Eden Wesley Rest home on Mt Eden Road where my Granny Nora spent the last year of her life. Some time ago during a weekend ramble, we’d come upon the place and it had triggered memories of childhood visits to see Granny. When I asked Stacey this morning, Did I tell you that this is where my Granny Nora lived in the early 1980s at the end of life, she said yes, but in her generous way left me the space to expand on my memories. This time I find myself remembering earlier, happier associated memories of Granny Nora.
 
Granny Nora was my mother’s mother. She was born in England in 1903. By the time I was born in the late 1960s she was already less than her full self. She had a tremor in her hand and often a vacant look in her eye. She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and most likely also Alzheimer’s — or one of the early onset dementia illnesses. Until I was six or seven, she’d lived in a flat with my Grandpa George. This was in Johannesburg South Africa. They had left England to follow their only child, my mother, and to be with us grandchildren too I imagine.
 
I remember a small flat, or perhaps it was just that it had a lot of furnishing, it’s hard to say. It felt busy and crowded. My fondest memories include finding spaces under tables and in various nooks and crannies in order to set up for play with the plastic farm animals. These were kept in a Little Red Schoolhouse ice-cream container packed full of hens and ducks and geese, cows, pigs, horses and sheep. I would organize the animals into groups using the patterned carpet as pens and play the farmer role in a series of farmyard fantasies. 
 
Playing cards was the other much loved and shared activity. We would play simple games like rummy or ‘follow suit’. I remember as Granny’s illness progressed the card games deteriorated into bemusing and highly unpredictable hands. Quiet unexpectedly in mid-game Granny might pick up half of the pack or randomly shuffle the deck, she’d discard an odd number, put aces on sevens, or a heart on a club when playing follow suit. Rules went out the window. At first, we might say something, but then my sisters and I had the presence of mind to just go with it, we learnt she wasn’t all in her right mind.
 
All my childhood she had a sort of vacant dullness about her, like the edge of her personality had been worn away or faded like fabric too long in the sun. I am sure this was the effect of the medication, some of which was given to pacify her reported rage and the discomfort of mind that can come with dementia.
 
When our family came to New Zealand in the late 1970s, my grandparents once again packed up and followed my mother, a year or so later. It’s extraordinary now to think that family reunification was permitted by immigration for someone so ill. I can’t imagine it being possible today.
 
By the time Granny came to live at the Eden Wesley Rest Home her world was reduced to a shuffle between a chair in the lounge and her bed, and then for what seemed like an age, she was just in bed. It was excruciating to visit her there. I can still recall the feeling of fear and perhaps even horror at hearing the moaning and shouting of patients, the smell of urine and cleaning chemicals and the institutional food smells of cabbage and stew. I remember my mother patiently talking to her about family news and my grandfather holding her hand and combing her thin grey strands of hair. I can still see the light blue comb that would sit on her bedside table.
 
I am intrigued by how this morning walk in lockdown, with its glimpse up the wide driveway marked by the big oak tree to the Eden Wesley Rest Home, has unlocked childhood memories of my Granny Nora. In her lifetime she experienced the trauma and uncertainties of two world wars, Spanish flu, and the Depression, and the social and personal challenges of chronic physical and mental ill-health. I wonder what she and the other ancestors would make of our current time.