In Remembrance

I'm finding it really hard to get going today, because yesterday was the funeral of a very special lady, Mr A's Grandma, who recently passed away only a few weeks after her 95th birthday. We travelled over to Bristol, where we gathered with family and old friends for what was a very emotional service.

So my usual topic of conversation is far from my mind. Instead I'm finding myself thinking about my elders and in particular Rose.

Grandma Rose as she was known to our children was a beautiful and gentle woman, full of kindness, consideration and spirit of fun and yesterday was a celebration of her life as well as mourning her passing.

Born in 1913, she would have reached the same age as my eldest son in 1920, almost a century ago. Sat here at my laptop in 2008, that seems such a long time ago.

I can't help wondering what life was like for a seven year old girl in those times and how it must have been to be in her shoes, witnessing all the changes that took place through the 20th Century.

After all, she spent her early years growing up through the Great War and her thirties living with the second world war and then bringing up a family through times of rationing. She also witnessed the emergence of technologies and the mass penetration of televisions, phones and cars.

With each grandchild came new developments in toys and Christmases and birthdays must have looked so different to how they once were. After the grandchildren, came the great-grandchildren, who now belong to a different age altogether, with different expectations to how things were when she was their age.

Like my own grandparents who passed away in the 90s, Grandma Rose wasn't green. Like many things back then "Green" hadn't even been invented, yet by modern standards she was as eco-friendly as they come. In the sixteen years that I knew her, she grew her own fruit and vegetables in her back garden and home-baked. She didn't have a car, wanted for very little, but had fun. Indeed she had masses and masses of fun, until a stroke sadly crippled her a few years ago.

I really wish I'd known what she thought about modern times, but I never took the opportunity to ask. It never occurred to me. Instead we would happily talk about family, her church, her friends and her love of dancing.

And as I now try to capture the spirit of old-fashioned values, I can't help feeling regretful that it's taken until now to find my feet, at a time when it all feels too late.

I feel like I've spent the last forty years partying, and running away from anything that was deemed old-fashioned. Now, I find myself turning my back on the party and grasping at the traditional, like an old comfort blanket to keep me safe, to protect our children and to keep the world from harm.

But as I try to leave the big party behind I realise I don't really want to be green. I don't want to be eco-friendly either. I just want to live lightly in a world where that's the norm, where such values aren't labelled as different. I want to be like the generations that are gradually leaving us behind.

I also want my children to follow suit and their children too. I want their actions to be our grandparents' legacy.

I want old-fashioned to be the latest trend, in a way that outshines retro.

But most of all. I want us to remember our ancestors for what they did and how they were, whether it was at war or peace.

And of course this Sunday is Remembrance Day, a day to remember all those who fought for our country through the terrible wars, a time to remember that the past wasn't all rosy.

All those people who have trod our earth and have now gone, many of whom were too young to have fathered children of their own and didn't live to see the modern days that came.

Oh dear, I apologise for these ramblings but I suppose, after all this outpour, you can probably guess I'm just an old-fashioned girl at heart. So thank you so much for listening, while I just get things off my chest.

We'll miss Grandma Rose now she's gone, but what we won't do is forget her special gifts, not things, but her smile, her kindness, her gentleness, her traditional values and her dancing.

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