Joan Emily Bequith Green

My Grandma died a few hours ago. She has been in several residential homes for a couple of years now and stopped walking, eating, drinking and speaking about a week ago. Her husband, Bill, died a couple of years ago and she seemed to be pretty tired of life after the rigours of his protracted death.

I was estranged from them for nearly a decade but made contact again a couple of years before Bill died. I'm very thankful that I did as they were a lovely couple who never showed me anything but love and were regrettably dragged into a family dispute which was none of their making.

The tragedy of the estrangement was that they wanted nothing more from life than to love their children and grandchildren but the break ups of their childrens marriages and the fact that three of their four children lived overseas meant that they were prevented from achieving such simple ambitions.

My fondest memories are of Christmas's past when we all gathered at their ramshackle house in South London to open presents and eat Grandmas fantastic feasts. They never owned their house and rented it from a Rachman style landlord until ill heath forced them to relocate to a sheltered flat. They had water pouring in from the roof and still heated the house with a pot bellied stove in the kitchen which was an unusual anachronism to say the least.

Needless to say the fire and my Grandfathers Heath Robinson contraptions which filled the home, coupled with the rabbits and chickens in the garden leant the house an feeling of fantasy which only seems noteworthy when I look back on it. I saw some old photo's recently of my young cousin standing on a chair to wash up after some celebratory dinner or other and seeing the familiar but forgotten paraphinalia which lined the walls made me think of them as a couple of before their time hippies.

Grandpop served in the army in India but was better known to us as a bus conductor on the familar red London buses. He was cruelly lampoooned prior to retirement for taking a job at a Police station where he cleaned the toilets but he seemed pretty happy with his lot as long as he had a few quid to lose on the horses.

Grandma was in service for most of her life. She worked in a stately home as a maid and a cook prior to meeting Grandpop but still cooked for some city gent in my lifetime. She had the appearance of a jovial cook being a very large woman who continually embarrased us Grandchildren by clutching us to her more than ample bosum as we were welcomed on the doorstep of her home.

Grandmas last months were probably spent largely alone as she slid away from life. This is a modern condition I regret which results in elderly people living longer but enjoying an increasingly poor quality of life. The body is tended to so that every last drop of life is wrung from it but the mind can't keep up and is allowed to fall into confusion and disrepair.

The elderly are no longer tended to by an unfortunate and noble member of the family but by well meaning and poorly paid immigrants, families move away from their origins to other towns, countries and continents and we generally seem to have less time for our elders than they had for us but that appears to be simply a fact of our time and isn't very high on the agenda when it comes to social ills.

I can't really criticise having ignored them for ten years and being on the other side of the world at the time of Grandmas death but it's a social issue which troubles me and I can't help but feel it's linked to other, more high profile issues of our day.

I have great difficulty teling people I love them but I think I told Grandma that when last we met and I believe I put in the subsequent correspondednce. I hope so because she deserves to know that she made a huge but understated impact on my life and no doubt on the lives of the other people lucky enough to be her grandchildren.