Deborah Shepard Books
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Writing Life >
      • Reviews & Interviews
    • Giving Yourself to Life
    • Her Life's Work
    • Translucence
    • Between The Lives
    • Reframing Women
    • Tributes
    • Personal Writings >
      • Lockdown Journal
      • Travel Journal
      • Elegy for a friend
      • Christchurch - Post Quakes
      • On a residency
      • Deborah’s Love Letter to the Women’s Bookshop
      • Deborah's Q & A With Unity Books
  • Writing Memoir
    • Defining Memoir
    • The Participatory Model
    • Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
    • The Value of a Writing Class
    • From writing course to book publication
    • Your Writing Space
    • Writing on a Theme >
      • Window
      • Surviving a Crisis
    • Reviews of Memoir
  • Writers' stories
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact

In the time of coronavirus

A collection of stories submitted by the public on their experience of living through the time of the Coronavirus pandemic.
We are now safely through the first phase of response to coronavirus in New Zealand and people are reflecting on what this major and previously unimaginable global catastrophe has meant for us, as individuals, in the 21st century. Globally the losses and the scale of human suffering have been very great. This forum offers a space to reflect upon the experience and to consider questions such as: What are we learning from the pandemic? What might we need to remember and preserve? Through the alert levels our prime minister said repeatedly, ‘Stay safe, be kind.’ What was your experience, what did you observe, what mattered and how might we re-imagine a better direction going forward? If you would like to contribute to the re-collective effort please send me your reflections, observations, journal entries, stories to my contact page... just a page of A4 writing, with a title and a brief bio and they will be added to the repository of important writings flowering in this space.

The search for knowledge is.. an exercise in reminiscence, that is, an effort to recall and recollect that which we once knew.

Ahsivai Margalit quoted in Richard Horton, “The Ethics of Memory,” The Lancet, 6 June 2020

Granny Nora by Sue Berman

21/6/2020

0 Comments

 
​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.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    WRITING GUIDELINES

    Archives

    January 2021
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020

    Authors

    All
    Anissa Ljanta
    Anita Arlov
    Anna Fomison
    Brian Sorrell
    Cath Koa Dunsford
    Cynthia Smith
    David Arrowsmith
    David Hill
    Delis Pitt
    Diane Brown
    Elizabeth McRae
    Estelle Mendelsohn
    Eva De Jong
    Faith Cleverley
    Fiona Kidman
    Fredrika Van Elburg
    Gregory O'Brien
    Jane Bissell
    Janet De Witt
    Jeanette De Heer
    Keith Woodley
    Leigh Burrell
    Liz March
    Liz Wilson
    Margo Knightbridge
    Marilyn Eales
    Mary Elsmore-Neilson
    Michelanne Forster
    Pamela Gordon
    Philip Temple
    Robyn Welsh
    Roger Horrocks
    Ruth Bonita
    Ruth Busch
    Siobhan Harvey
    Sue Berman
    Tessa Duder
    Trevor M Landers
    Yvonne Van Dongen

    RSS Feed

Writing Memoir
Defining Memoir
The Participatory Model
Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
​From Writing Course to Book Publication
Your Writing Space
​Writing on a Theme
Reviews of Memoir
Writers Stories
​
Events
​About
Testimonials
What People Say

Media
​Contact
Copyright © 2017 Deborah Shepard
  • Home
  • Books
    • The Writing Life >
      • Reviews & Interviews
    • Giving Yourself to Life
    • Her Life's Work
    • Translucence
    • Between The Lives
    • Reframing Women
    • Tributes
    • Personal Writings >
      • Lockdown Journal
      • Travel Journal
      • Elegy for a friend
      • Christchurch - Post Quakes
      • On a residency
      • Deborah’s Love Letter to the Women’s Bookshop
      • Deborah's Q & A With Unity Books
  • Writing Memoir
    • Defining Memoir
    • The Participatory Model
    • Tips on Writing and Posting a Story
    • The Value of a Writing Class
    • From writing course to book publication
    • Your Writing Space
    • Writing on a Theme >
      • Window
      • Surviving a Crisis
    • Reviews of Memoir
  • Writers' stories
    • Covid-19 Stories
    • Writing Guidelines
  • Events
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Media
  • What People Say
  • Contact