The Cure for Sleep: April Issue
002: Memory Games: Holding our loved ones in mind
| Tanya Shadrick | Apr 16 | 8 | 18 |
The Cure For Sleep (W&N: Feb 2022) is a memoir about the ways in which our earliest loves and losses affect our adult lives – and what it takes to gain strength and purpose from these, instead of only circling those events in memory like hungry ghosts.
April’s extract is about trying to hold a person in mind, even as they are going away from us. After reading, do share a short true tale of your own on the theme of memory-making in the comments section.
You can read the stories that subscribers are contributing to each monthly theme on The Cure For Sleep book site: march issue | april issue
april’s extract
Last wild minutes of that long and sleepless week. Things I said and did before I removed my granny from her home forever:
Fetched a best outfit so nurses might understand her value.
Held up a mirror while she did her lips and cheeks.
Brushed her white hair as I’d never been allowed.
Sat her dressed and ready by the unlit fire.
Tried next to make a going-away bag which could carry the whole house, its essence, off with her to hospital: knitting needles, wool, wedding photo. The cheap beads she put on over a clean blouse every evening (a habit of changing off after each day’s work to feel beautiful for her husband and herself that she’d kept up in his memory). Envelope of funny stories she cut from newspapers and Woman’s Weekly, that she could never read aloud without crying with laughter. Letter her favourite grandchild wrote from the farm in her first year of widowhood, asking if she’d please come back to help with lambing? The photos of me and others she took to bed on the night she tried to die.
Ran after that through the only remaining rooms of my childhood (my mother moved often after I left home; my father’s house – one painful season aside – had always been locked to me). Rifled every drawer and wardrobe as if I could steal and keep safe how I loved her: Cotton reels; shoe polish; jars of homemade jam and pickles; hat for Chapel; fifty-year old crêpe-paper Christmas decorations; smelling salts. Even heavy things I could never use, I wanted to take away in my arms: crank-handled sewing machine, coal scuttle, meat mincer.
Looking, looking, looking. As in the memory games she would make on a tray for my pre-school self, whipping off the teatowel and daring me – quick! – to remember everything: thimble, nutmeg, queen of hearts. This time trying to hold her whole life in my mind. The little margarine tub where she kept soap and flannel for the strip-wash done at her kitchen sink each morning. Sand-timer got from a jumble sale with a crude drawing of a cockerel on the wooden board that held it, and this wisdom: The cock does all the crowing but the hen does all the work. Tins of bright enamel for painting a new spring coat on the garden gnome each year. Binoculars with foxed lenses and a mildewed case used daily to keep watch on weather coming in from the coast towards the fields of her old farm.
Understanding, only then, how strange and static my way of living had always been. How I began when young, through loss, to prize routine and everyday objects more than people. As if by loving a person in pieces, through pieces, to pieces, I could suspend time, stop sorrow.
Last words. Me kneeling, holding her hands in mine.
‘Have a good rest at the hospital, Granny, and be home for Spring.’
‘Once I go, I shan’t never come back.’
‘But you must. I’ll have a baby before the end of next year.’
What I’d always pushed away, I now pulled close. An offering to the woman I loved who’d been happiest in the care of children and small animals. Wanting – too late – to make a baby that would make her want to live.
about my work
author site | book site | twitter | instagram
| 8 | 18 |
Tanya, your wonderful story has both broken and lifted my heart. I can’t wait for the book to come out! I recognise parts of my own story within yours, and you have unleashed so many memories and feelings, in this piece in particular about my great grandmother, Amy.
The story we grew up with, passed on to me by my father, strangely, not my mother, her grand daughter, was that she had been in service, fell prey to the attentions of the master, or his son, or someone, anyone, and had become pregnant. Because of this, she had been locked away in the crazy house until she died, nameless and forgotten. It’s what happened to unmarried women then, just one of those Victorian things.
Thirty years later, my work on our family tree uncovered a different story. My great grandmother was feeble-minded, deaf and dumb, and also a scholar, depending on which census you read. She had worked at the local mill with everyone else, lodged with various family members in a succession of tiny tied-cottages, swapping about here and there, weavers all the way down. The birth certificate named a father I could not trace, a name made up to save face no doubt, but she looked after her only child until he went to fight in the French trenches.
It wasn’t until she was forty-one that they took her away, just as they had taken her mother and her sister to a different asylum, the reasons unknown or concealed. She died inside that place after 46 winters, in the spring following the birth of my sister; they could have met, but my mother didn’t know about her grandmother then, and realised only years later that she must have been ‘the old lady’ that her parents went to visit ‘in hospital’ on occasion.
My sister’s own daughter bears her name.
I've read this several times out loud now--reveling in both the sound of the words in my ears and the way my mouth is possessed by the need to chew them and tumble them around and deliver them into the air. Your writing, so lyrical....it's tangible in such a way that all the senses can feel it. As I sit here thinking about my own experiences of losing someone beloved to me, I'm struck by how little I have physically—no sand timer, no binoculars, no beads. But I remember…
Blips and beeps and bells from the other side of the ICU curtain mixed with feet scuffling and squeaking across the floor. He was gone really the moment the aneurism broke free, but his heart was still beating at an incredible clip; strong; a steady green line on the monitor, here and gone all at once. I wiped a drop of blood from the corner of his mouth, and as the sun rose and my grandfather Stanley lay dying I held his hand. I noted its squareness, thick knuckles, traced the gold band he’d worn for over 50 years, and I saw it for the first time: his hands were mine. Hands that held four children and grandchildren, and one great grandchild. That roasted lemon-stuffed chickens basted with olive oil and oregano over campfires. Fingers that tied flies before palms cast out over the water. Hands that planted two gardens of vegetables every growing season, watered, pruned, picked shiny green peppers. Other than photos I do not possess any objects treasured by him. He was buried with the compass he used to navigate forests, and I’ve no idea what became of his walking stick. But do I have his hands. My hands are the objects. My hands are the treasure.