When my cousin Jennifer died of cancer two years ago, at the age of 53, she’d been in a wheelchair for a long time for other medical reasons. Unable to work, she became a disability advocate, a scourge of English local government, a woman who insisted on living alone and simmered with rage.

I am not qualified to write about the experience of being a woman in my mother’s family. But I too am marked by the way my grandparents were married young because they were about to have a baby. They named the child Ruth, a dolorous name which means “compassion.” In the Bible she has her own short book and is celebrated for saying: “For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.”

My aunt Joan, Jennifer’s mother, says that her father was a kind man given to ungovernable rages. He was a plumber who once stuffed the cracks in the doors and windows of the kitchen, turned on the gas and waited to die. Later, when the children had grown up and fled, he had a terrible accident on his motorcyle which maimed one hand and forearm. He designed and made various gadgets that enabled him to keep on working with wood.

Three weeks before he died of cancer, his son John met him in the front garden to tell him he was getting a divorce. The old man rushed upstairs, pushed open the window, and poured an enamel bucket of water on him. Then he hit his son on the head with the bucket. They never saw each other again.

Just before Easter, Joan went to see Ruth in Adelaide, and the family gathered together. My sister has done a lot to bring me back into the family fold, and to reconnect with my father, who last saw his wife in the divorce court in 1969.

We talked about Jennifer. It must have been a terrible journey for Joan, and her husband Ken. But it was me who cried, not her. They have a good digital camera and a laptop. As they said, “We inherited these from Jennifer. We thought we’d better learn to use them”.

They have also bought a video camera, and learnt how to take shots that accumulate into sequences. They buzz around beauty spots filming each other going in and out of doors and pointing at signs. Not bad for a couple in their late seventies.

It was a very poignant moment when Joan and Ruth said goodbye. They won’t see each other again. Indeed, I won’t see Joan and Ken either. The world is still a very big place, and old folks get knocked around by travel.

My aunt is not an introspective person. She came out of a brutal childhood better than the others. She said of my mother: “Ever since she was a child, Ruth has been sitting in the corner eating worms.”

She saved the housekeeping money for twelve years to get the money to divorce my father.

I have been thinking about this on my own behalf, of course. But I am reminded of the feelings and the echoes by a lovely post at The View from Elsewhere, about the death of a brother and the nature of grief.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 8:03 pm and is filed under domestic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.