A TRIBUTE TO GRANDPARENTS

Growing up, I knew that I was lucky because I knew three of my grandparents.  My friends all vaguely remembered playing with their grandparents when they were very young but I was actually able to form a relationship with each of them, two living in Canada (10 minutes away from where I grew up) and one living in England.

Both my grandfathers fought in WWII and came back home to their families.  They never spoke about their time in the war and we never pushed for information.  It wasn’t until the last few years of his life that my British grandfather started telling me war stories.  Because I was so lucky to get them back from the war, Remembrance Day is very special to me.  I can honour them and their colleagues who fought for our current way of life.

My British grandfather was one of those strong, silent men.  He was always happy and enjoyed life to the fullest.  He came to visit my family in Canada every year and I looked forward to it every time.  As a child, I use to talk about him for weeks in anticipation.  One year, he was visiting us when parent-teacher interviews happened and, because of my constant excitement leading up to his arrival, my teacher said “Ahh…this must be Papa Michael” (I was in French immersion) after meeting him.  That name stuck so, from then on, he knew that it was one of his Canadian grandchildren when we called him and would scream “Papa Michael” in the phone.  His other six other grandchildren called him “Grandfather” so least our nickname minimized his guessing as to which one of the grandchildren was calling!

When he finally retired at the age of 75, he picked up and moved across England to return to university.  One of the years he was at university was the 50^th anniversary since WWII and he was taking a history course about the war.  Can you imagine the knowledge the rest of the class, students and professor alike, was able to take advantage of?

My Canadian grandfather was another strong, silent man.  He was the stereotypical “mad scientist”, right down to his messy hair (despite continuously combing it).  He was very proud of his academic achievements, and especially of losing first place in a university academic competition once to a female student.  He spoke of that frequently – if someone was going to be smarter than him, he wanted it to be a woman!

As a child, he and I spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in his workshop studying his rocks and minerals.  He was always very kind and patient with me learning his passion and trying to understand the mathematics behind it all.  We use to walk every day to the corner store to pick up a newspaper, and sometimes a snack.  The route we took didn’t have sidewalks the whole way so he would always make sure he was walking on the outside of my brother and I.  I asked him about that one day and he said that it was because then a car wouldn’t hit us if one lost control and he would be able to push us out of the way.

My Canadian grandmother was a very strong, independent and head strong woman.  She was the stereotypical grandmother with milk and cookies whenever we came over – she even had the white hair always pulled back in a bun!  There were schedules to keep to keep the house running, and to get all the errands run.  She was completely shocked when she came home one day from the bank and they called her by her first name.  This was a topic of discussion for years afterwards… “No one has last names anymore!”.

She was the most organized and independent woman you could ever meet.  Although she would probably never admit it, she was a feminist.  My father jokingly says that she wouldn’t agree with a man because she would never lower herself.  When she and my grandfather married, she has the strength to have a meeting with her supervisor at the University of Toronto to tell her that she would be returning to her teaching position after the wedding – this was just over 60 years ago at a time when getting married meant the woman was giving up her job and staying home to look after her new husband.

She was the head of our family.  She looked after my grandfather (ten years her junior) until his Alzheimer’s Disease progressed to the state where he needed more medical attention than our family could provide.  She dressed up each time to visit him at the seniors care facility.  She even watched as he held another woman’s hand who lived in the facility because he thought she was his wife instead of my grandmother.  She accepted this reality with the grace I have come to expect of women whose husbands left to fight in the war.  We were not surprised when one day she announced that she would no longer come with us to visit my grandfather.  We knew not to question it.  When my grandmother made up her mind about something, there was no trying to convince her otherwise.

The reason I am writing this is not only to share my experiences with grandparents but also to honour them.  My last surviving grandparent (my grandmother) passed away last night in her sleep after a long hard battle with Alzheimer’s Disease.  As per her request for “no fuss”, we are not holding a funeral but I wanted to share with my friends and family how much all my grandparents meant to me. 

Meghan Graham-Martin

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