Floundering

At this point, my grandfather died. He was in his late eighties. His body had been failing him for the past couple of years. The quality of his life had been deteriorating. He died suddenly, of an aortic aneurism when playing Bridge.Hardly a devastating tragedy, then. In fact, I was glad for him. We had been close, and his death came as a personal shock, but I felt no guilt and told myself, and truthfully, that he would have given me hell for making a meal of my grief.

So why is this relevant? I have asked myself that question again and again. I know that it was an important part of the succession of events which transformed me.
Perhaps it was simply a salutary reminder of the shortness of life and the necessity to live it to the full.

Perhaps it was the recognition that my grandparents had lived a life of individual independence and mutual support simply impossible today. Perhaps it was my family’s response to the change – the guilt competitions, the emotional bullying, the systematic release of long pent bile as each of them competed with the other when now they came together, supposedly to share their grief.  Perhaps too it was a recognition of the fraudulence and instability of so much upon which we relied. As the youngest member of the family, married to a proper man of whom everyone approved, genuinely concerned with my mother’s welfare and too detached to wish to compete, I became the rock to which everyone moored his or her lurching craft. I enjoyed my new status. I was the perfect child, mature, responsible and calm.