“She lived a good, long life.”
When someone dies at ninety-four, you tend to hear this refrain. As though good and long are interchangeable, longevity standing in for joy and fulfilment. As though the very act of having survived for over nine decades is remarkable in itself and death as a consequence seems to be just a footnote.
But what if that long life wasn’t a particularly happy one? What if it was fraught with unimaginable tragedy and loss? Would it still be considered a good one?
A woman, orphaned young, brought up by a maternal uncle and his family, not treated well by her aunt with no recourse except an early marriage to a young pharmacist with a promising future. Great start, right? Just when things are looking up and when life seems to be settling into a happy pattern, a division occurs – the partitioning of a nation, the cleaving of land, a clumsy attempt to separate a country by religious belief, asked for by the citizens and granted by the retreating former rulers. Caught up in the tides of her times, she has to leave everything behind, carrying her infant son and escaping with her husband’s family to the Hindu nation of India, all of their lands and properties being absorbed into Pakistan. A refugee, she learns to survive on little, adjusting to a diminished present, but grateful to be alive when so many others perished at the hands of their own brethren. Now life can finally start to get better.
It does, for a while. A decade or so of a happy married life, two more children and she can finally exhale and put her past difficulties behind her. Or, can she?
Losing her husband to a brain haemorrhage before she even turns forty brings her right back to where she started. Except that now she has three children to provide for, one of whom is barely five years old. Once again, with characteristic stoicism and fortitude, she submits to her destiny. She takes up sewing jobs, alterations and tailoring, whatever it takes to make ends meet. She allows her brother-in-law to run the pharmacy in her husband’s stead, hoping that someday her young sons will be able to step in.
Two of her sons stand like rocks beside her, throughout her life. The third betrays her.
Together with the uncle, he cheats and embezzles. An arranged marriage brings an ambitious and shrewd young woman into the family, who wishes to better her own prospects at the cost of all others. Together, the trio tries to usurp all the assets but are foiled at the very last minute. A long court case ensues in which the youngest son tries to get his mother imprisoned, furious at being denied his entitlement.
Estranged from her son and his family, she lives out the rest of her years with quiet dignity, adding this privation to the ledger of losses she has stacked up her entire life. Her other two sons stand by her, through thick and thin and that is the only saving grace in a lifetime beset by misery and misfortune.
Does this sound like a movie? Or a novel? It could be, with all its twists and turns and convoluted plot lines. Except that it isn’t.
This is the very real story of my paternal grandmother. A woman whose life was filled with suffering and pain. Never one to complain, she withstood every storm that was sent her way, trying her best to stay strong and uphold the ideals of her generation. She was not a particularly educated woman, but her knowledge of home remedies was next to none with people coming from far and wide to consult with her. Always willing to provide a listening ear or a helping hand, her wisdom came out of her own lived experiences, not out of books.
A lady who favoured plain saris, little jewellery and had her hair pulled back in a bun, her simplicity was her best adornment. Skin like alabaster, she was a classic beauty, completely unaware of and unconcerned about her looks. Outside packaging mattered very little to her and through her the lesson of learning to appreciate what lies within percolated down to me.
In the last decade or so, she had become a prisoner in her own body, her faculties slowly starting to fail her. Unable to see or hear, there was always a dreamy, contemplative look on her face when we visited her. At first, she could tell who it was by touching our hands or our faces, greeting us with a contained joy. Slowly that tapered off too. On my last visit in January, it was clear to me that she didn’t have long.
She left at 1458 hours on Tuesday, the 18th of August. There were just three people at her cremation, two of them her sons and one a kindly neighbour. In Covid days, it was a quiet and unassuming funeral, much like the lady herself.
We enter and exit this world alone. In all the time that we spend on this earth, we accumulate family, friends, material possessions, lands and riches. We do good and bad, we create, we destroy and we try to leave some sort of legacy behind. One that declares that we were here and that we led a good life.
But what constitutes a good life?
Is it one that is full to the brim with happy experiences, an easy and comfortable existence, or is it one that forges you into gold by throwing you into fire repeatedly, refining and purifying you each and every time?
If it is the latter, then yes, she had a good life. In her ninety-odd years, she might not have accumulated much by way of wealth, but the love and the loyalty of her two sons were worth more than all the riches of the world. Her legacy, such as it is, is the deep respect, regard and love that we feel towards her. In mourning her passing, I feel not just the loss of a grandmother, but of an age and an era that I will never encounter again. They do not make them like her anymore. ❤️
