Recent family losses

Two of my relatives died during the last few months. Uncle Max (my mother’s father’s brother) died on Anzac Day (25 April), and my grandmother (my mother’s mother) died on 11th May.

I only saw Uncle Max occasionally when he was alive, and it was almost invariably in the context of a large family gathering with lots of other people around. I associate him primarily with memories from my childhood. He lived in Balhannah and owned a pine plantation, which had a lovely fairy-tale atmosphere when I was a child; I once went looking for wolves (of course, there are none really). He was also into woodcarving, and had a pool table which he made himself; it was on Uncle Max’s pool table that I learned to play pool. He had a joke pool cue, made from a twisty branch of wood, which he explained was for a professional pool player to use when playing against him, if the opportunity ever arose. Uncle Max used to sing bass in choirs and musicals, but that was mostly before I knew him. I don’t think I ever really had a chance to chat with him on the topic of music.

I have mentioned my grandmother, Nancy Pearce, on this blog before. By the end of her life she was bedridden in the nursing home, unable to speak and (at the very end) unable even to swallow due to the cumulative effect of many minor strokes. Yet she was at peace, intellectually alert, and never lost her sense of humour. The last time I saw her alive, I played some Flanders and Swann songs to her from CD, in particular The Chameleon, The Whale, The Sloth, The Rhinoceros, The Armadillo, The Wild Boar, and The Ostrich. I intended in the last few months to compile a CD of my favourite music as a gift for my grandmother, but I never got around to doing this. Her husband David (my last surviving grandparent) is still living in the nursing home.

My grandmother’s funeral was a first for me in that it was the first time I have ever spoken officially at a funeral. Here is the full text of my address.

When I was trying to think of something that I could contribute to this service, I found that what came to mind was not so much any specific event, or any specific moment, but rather, some more general memories of things that Grandnan loved to do, and of things that Grandnan loved to have other people do for her. And three things in particular come to mind. She always liked a good chat - a good, thoughtful chat; she loved to have people play music for her; and she never refused a good massage.

When I was young, when I was six or seven, Grandnan would take me out of school once a week to go to music lessons. And afterwards we’d go back to her place for lunch, and for dessert there would always be her legendary Tuesday Pudding with custard. Back in those days it was not as much me who gave massages to Grandnan, as Grandnan who gave massages to me. And the kind of music that Grandnan particularly liked was music that could help her to visualise a scene. She was very fond of imagining a scene through the music that she heard. And she took the same approach to her massages. When I was young she would sometimes draw a picture on my back with her finger, and she would describethe picture as she was drawing it. Or sometimes she would draw abstract art, and with her soothing voice she would tell me the colours of the stripes and the circles and the shapes that she drew.

Well, over the years Grandnan has heard me play quite a lot of music, and she’s been on the receiving end of quite a few massages as well. And towards the end of her life, she wasn’t able to speak to us anymore, but she would still show us through her facial expressions how much we were appreciated whenever we visited. And I am sure that one of my lasting memories of Grandnan will be the way that her face would light up whenever somebody told a joke. Her sense of humour was one thing that lasted all the way to the end.

I didn’t have as much opportunity as I would have liked to share things with Grandnan in the last period of her life, and so as a tribute to my grandmother, I would like to play from a CD a piece of my own music that she never had a chance to hear. The thought occured to me that I should offer to give everyone the massage that she never had a chance to feel, but I decided that would be silly. However, it would be a tragedy if we remembered my grandmother without finding at least one opportunity to be silly.

So, anyway, this is my tribute.

The music that I dedicated to my grandmother can be heard on my website here. I got lots of very positive feedback on this.

Incidentally, another small contribution I made to the funeral was to print the “Reserved” signs to go on the seats reserved for family. I put some thought into this, because I wanted the signs to look friendly as opposed to imposing, which “Reserved” signs unfortunately often are. I used a soft informal font, shadow, green writing, a squiggly underline to produce the sign, photographed below. (Apologies for the quality; a snapshot straight from the word processor would be better, but only my parents’ computer has the right font installed):