Hannah May

Messenger of good news

She was fifty-three years old when I was born. But I have been with my grandmother since the very first day she entered the world, limp with lungs empty.

It wasn’t the only time she briefly exited the stage, but it was by far her most favourite.

She recounted the tale many times. Of how, after a sequence of losses through a six month miscarriage and a son that lived for just a day, her mother Evangeline had once again given birth to a baby that wouldn’t cry.

But this time something extraordinary happened.

Determined not to witness her sister lose yet another infant, her Aunty Ada reordered the stars and rewrote the history of a family by beating the life into Gran, whose ear was ripped clean off in the process.

Between the rudimentary mode of resuscitation and the physical shock of the trauma, a miracle occurred: she released a deafening scream and our life together began.

I have seen it.

A blue-faced baby slapped red raw to stimulate the rushing of blood and breath to her body: the first fibres of mine.

Evangeline.

Twenty-three years later, she carried me in her womb through the floating foetus of my mother. Syzygy. My story, suspended in her; a mere speck the size of a single grain of sand.

An ovum is the only cell in the human body that can be seen by a naked eye. Did you know that?

My ensoulment came three decades later with her Gemini magic when my twin brother, Ben, and I were conceived; but our matrilineage had long before been drawn, her origins determined as my own.

How do I know this?

Because everything I inherited was hers, including my own daughters. My firstborn, her namesake: Evangeline. She is recalled by you too, Afi, with your wildfire wilfulness. ‘Grandfather’ for him, and because you have been here before. Reincarnate.

In you, she is born again.

As am I.

From that first precious cell of mine, held in her womb’s water. Russian Dolls of matter, carbon copied like stardust.

I told you that I have always swum with her. That she swims with us still. Through the ocean in all of us, flowing down the bloodline.

Bodies of water that buoy and keep us.

We cross over, together.

We carry each other always, in life and in death,

yn bewnans hag yn mernans.

I depart as air

A short stroll from Gran’s house in the hilltop village of Madron where she was born, lived and died, and where I spent much of my childhood, there is a wooded valley overlooking the half-moon shaped bay.

Wild Cornish hedgerows knotted with gorse, foxgloves and brambles frame tumbling green fields that slope toward the castle on St Michael’s Mount rising from the blue-grey lagoon.

Ocean blue: the absorption and scattering of white light.

And the colour of her eyes.

It is here where she would walk the dogs every day, where as children and adults we would often walk with her. Where she felt inspired enough to compose the only piece of creative writing of hers I ever read, perhaps that she ever wrote, as she wasn’t a writer as such.

But I think that she could have been.

It was also here where we found ourselves wandering without her at sunrise on the morning that she died.

Except that the scene in front of us that day wasn’t hers.

After days of stubborn fog and driving rain, the heavens closed and her vision of greys surrendered to a bursting of blue softened by the dawn’s first white light of her departure.

We paused in silence before embracing each other, four forlorn siblings cast adrift, then returning to her house to find her bed as vacant as our fugitive souls.

From that July day, I stepped into her image. Sometimes it was all I could see – her muted greys and incandescent sunlight – whether I was looking at the island or not...

‘A couple of mornings last week whilst walking the dogs I had two wonderful unusual views of the Mount. The usual place, out in the fields, but the colour was so striking - shades of grey and silver, nothing else at all.

The Mount was a dark grey, but fuzzed around the edges. The land behind was shrouded in shifting mist and the sea was still and softly grey except for a lake of silver to the right. Shafts of silver seemed to split the greys as the sun struggled, but couldn’t quite make it.’

Two months after she died and still flooded with sorrow, I took our dog Baxter to the beach and swam a short distance across it, my salty tears swelling with the ocean that lifted me as I moved through it.

As she moved through me.

Before I turned toward the coast path home, I noticed that the fading light of the season had suddenly torn the sky with a startling intensity and gathered on the water to the right of The Mount, but was struck with the thought that even if it had landed to the left, I’d have sworn blind to her version anyway.

I can only see life through her blue-tinted eyes.

What other way is there?

Into the runaway sun

A star’s swan song is neither seen nor heard. Before it depletes its fuel and dies, it expands into a red giant then collapses toward its core into a dense remnant of its former self: a white dwarf. It is at this final cool and dim stage of life when it creates carbon in its deep interior by fusing three helium nuclei. Russian Dolls of space and time. The carbon ashes are scattered into the stellar winds, which is how next generation stars are born.

This is the destiny of every ordinary star, including the sun,

howl.

She would do that at the moon sometimes, a wolf-like whimper, inciting the dog to join her. But she would never wail at the sun, only worship it.

Though she had a naturally bronzed complexion, Gran developed a melanoma when I was a young child, but casually survived it like every other life-threatening affliction: sepsis from a cat bite, hepatitis from swimming in the Thames when she lived in London in the late 1940s (the source of her momentarily dead out-of-body experience), spinal surgery - “Before I went under I told that surgeon, ‘If you nick my chord, cut the whole damn thing and finish me off because I’d rather be dead than paralysed’.”

“It was nothing,” she’d brush my hand away as I stroked the scarred paler skin on her thigh where she’d received her skin graft. We’d be sitting on the beach or Battery Rocks and this palm-sized patch of transplanted tissue would fascinate me. Then she would close her eyes and carry on sunbathing to the sound of my incessant questioning, laced like salt on the sea breeze.

Lying on the rocks as they radiate the ray’s warmth was one of her favourite pastimes, and another I have inherited. I suppose because it is so elemental, so connecting. It feels as though you’re nestled in the centre of a star, the sun emanating from both beneath and above your body, which she always regarded as having healing properties. It streaked her hair white and brightened the blue in her eyes. It was the direction to which she would always turn.

That same starlit warmth poured from her like phosphorescence. Us children bathed in it a lifetime without ever getting burnt.

After all, it was her zodiac’s season: she was born and died on a Tuesday in summer, first arriving just before the solstice and finally departing not long after, though she was a perennial constant in our lives.

Evangeline.

Forever chasing the light.

To Love Somebody

There are two things I always promised my grandmother: that I’d look after her in her old age and that I’d one day write a book in her name.

Her end of life was a drawn out affair that amounted to years of care that I knew I was destined to bestow and, despite my often-stifling sense of sadness, was more than glad to do so. Protracted periods of illness and gradual decline that time both painstakingly measured and miraculously failed to touch.

Days stretched out, months sped by, and she continued to live while losing herself to a slow process of fading. The agony and love we shared was both devastating and elevating, and inextricably linked, as they famously are; and I embodied that beautiful line from Anne Michaels that I once read to her aloud as she nodded in deep agreement: ‘Grief strikes where love struck first’.

Endings and beginnings collided as my daughters were born into her final years. Life looped and limped/leaped on. There was something hauntingly beautiful in the juxtaposition of her decay and their growth; both blatant and disrespectful of the other while silently acknowledging the irony.

Like a joke the three of them secretly shared.

She would often say that they were “growing like trees” while in turn the earth rumbled for her return.

Gran diminished discreetly and suddenly, often simultaneously. In her late eighties she became physically less able, yet still independent, living alone and managing all daily tasks and desires well, then less proficiently, then intermittently, then barely.

Reaching ninety was a milestone she celebrated with family gatherings, a flurry of sea swims and a lavish weekend in London where she dined with my brothers in The Shard and watched a West End production of Dirty Dancing. But after that she slowly became more age-aware and started referring to herself occasionally as “too old”, and though she persevered in her customary dogmatic way, began to edge toward and even admit defeat uneasily often.

One of the many stories she regaled from when I was very young involved one of our dogs being euthanized. I had apparently confided that if she got ill or old, I would do the same for her, which she thought was the funniest and most touching thing a child could say in such a moment.

The notion of being there for her in the future when she needed me embedded itself in my growing mind, not just as a time-honoured generational reciprocation of care, but borne from the fact that she had single-handedly heaped so much of herself into our upbringing by being the mainstay in our lives. Her omnipresence was even more vital because of our parents’ acrimonious divorce, the protracted custody battle that ensued, my mother’s detachment and later, the sudden deaths of our grandfather and father just over 18 months apart when I was fourteen and fifteen years-old. Both paternal figures, surrogate and otherwise: dust. Two tombstones separated them in the graveyard.

She became more than blood: a supergiant of a matriarch. She acted as both parents and grandparents - the author, God, of so much.

Including now, loss.

Gran was one of the greatest loves of my life. A force of reckoning, passion, generosity, humour, spirit, wisdom, kindness and strength that I will carry until my end. That I hope my daughters will continue to impart; already I see that she is in them in ways that unsilence my reeling broken heart. That allow the possibility of its healing or, at least, a solace in the vast open space she leaves behind.

Baby Girl

Everyone promised a rush of euphoric love. A soaring high that only childbirth bestows, especially with your firstborn. I didn’t feel that with you, Evy. The overpowering sensation that engulfed me the moment that I pushed you toward the ground as I stood at the foot of the bed wasn’t love – that came later – but relief.

During what I considered a tortuously full nine months of pregnancy, which were by all other standards textbook since we were both completely healthy and I suffered minimal side effects, I had pondered not the pain, but only how I would feel.

There was a blue moon the night I discovered I was pregnant with you. Shortly after, I fainted in the office of the magazine I write for, though thankfully I happened to be the only person there at the time. I carried on working before retreating to Gran’s house a short drive up the hill. She was the first and only other person besides your father that knew I was pregnant, and promptly ordered me to lie down and rest. I turned on the TV as a distraction and we watched the World Swimming Championships together which, combined with her soothing words, staved off the sickness enough for me to drive home, eat the obligatory white carbs required by that stage of gravidity, and put myself to bed early.

When she was pregnant with my mother, Gran suffered from what is medically defined nowadays as ‘hyperemesis gravidarum’: extreme morning sickness that – for her – lasted the entire pregnancy. So she was the perfect sympathiser for my constant undercurrent of queasiness. “I couldn’t even keep water down,” she would say. “I lost weight when I was pregnant with your mum!”

She watched in awe as you rolled around inside of me, Evy, placing her hand on my undulating belly while telling you to take it easy on me, though you never did.

On the Monday before you were born my labour had tentatively started and it was your Aunty Jess’ birthday, so we took Gran to Trengwainton Tearooms for cake and were sitting in the garden’s early spring sunshine when I whispered to her, only her, that you were on your way.

That night, the contractive pain commenced but stopped before dawn, leaving its residual deep ache and aftershocks before rising up again after dark the following night and again subsiding before sunup: a cycle of wave sets that left me stranded in the depths of your delivery, utterly exasperated. My only solace was to spend the days with her while we waited together.

“She will come when she is ready,” Gran said, already knowing that you had inherited her stubbornness as well as her name.

That final evening the pattern replayed. Intense contractions that abruptly ceased, and just as I was about to lie down in tearful defeat – the flooding of broken waters and an emptying, culminating in the blustery March’s morning arrival of Evangeline May.

Evy for short.

For three long days I had felt everything. Every stirring, every sensation, every paroxysm of pain; refusing anodyne in favour simply of the pranayamic breath,

hwyth.

I felt every damn thing but love.

Why am I telling you this? Because childbirth and grief are but a minor distinction. The rising and falling, the sense of loss, are emotional twinships.

Those first few months after the event: numbness.

Eventually the love flows, and when it does, you feel as though you might drown in it. It’s a grasping – for air, for life, for a sense of self: another thing that abandons you.

Birth and death share a hyper-reality, but are also a distortion of it. You question everything you thought you knew and feel more reaffirmed, but absent, than ever before.

Yet they are also the most wondrous and otherworldly of occurrences.

Beyond us.

For me, motherhood and mourning are a burden and a becoming. Both are a state of physical and mental being involving cognitive and corporeal change. Metamorphosis. A marvel aptly conveyed by the Cornish language, since the word for womb, brys, also means ‘mind’. Then there’s the wonderfully onomatopoeic diberth that sounds like a conflation of ‘die’ and ‘birth’, and translates as both ‘depart’ and ‘separate’ to signal the unique bond between our becoming and unbecoming.

Being a mother and bereaving a beloved are the most grounding, quotidian, human things that can happen to you: people are born and die every moment of every day. It’s the only certainty of our existence. Creating life and losing it is something we will all witness or personally bear; there is no escape from mortality, whatever your belief system.

They are also two of the most primal phenomena we are likely to encounter. The involuntary screams of panic when I realised Gran was dying, the guttural groans during my parturition, the torrent of release that ensued: shock followed by a surrendering.

There’s a beautiful brutality to birth and death. A mind-numbing mundanity to motherhood (and, to an extent, grief), though many women won’t ever concede to it. Reality alters. I resisted perceiving things as they were despite my acute awareness: that I was a mother / that she was gone. When Evy first said the word ‘mama’ I wasn’t sure whether to clap or cry. I still struggle to apply the past tense to Gran.

The postpartum and post-obit conditions cross over. I was all melancholy and surface tension; the slightest touch would cause a rippling emotional effect. But even before I had reached either point, there was the gestation period, since pregnancy and anticipatory grief also share an expansive common ground: a gradual building of pressure.

Then comes a softening.

Love, kara.

During those unendingly dark nights, it is all you know.

Matrescence and grief separate you from your self, they play with your polarities and self-perception and are the very definition of identity crises.

You lose a part of your self – physically with the body you conceived, grew and birthed, or through the vacated body of the deceased; in my case, the person who gave me, me.

But she also gave me you, one Evangeline to another. Did I tell you that one of the meanings of your moniker, Evy is Cornish for ‘me’? The other is ‘life’, from the Hebrew, the language from which my name also derives.

We are named and nurtured into being, our lives – present lives, past lives and afterlives – all mirrors of times before.