When my grandmother reached her 80s, she started to struggle living on her own. My mum offered for her to come and live with her. She'd need to sell her house to pay for upgrades which would help her stay a bit more independent in the downstairs. However, my grandmother didn't want to burden anyone and insisted on going into a care home instead. Her house was still sold to pay for the home.
My grandmother was always very in control of her life and routine and I think she was under the impression that she would still have some control over her routine in the care home. This was not the case and she quickly spiraled into depression. Shortly after I discovered that I was pregnant with my first child. My mother and I thought that her hearing the news would pick her up a bit.
When I arrived at the home she was in her room and had some news of her own that she beat me to my announcement with. She told me of her love for us all and that she was ready and wanted to die now.
I remember she hugged me and was apologetic that she'd upset me with that when I had such good news for her, but she was still adamant that death was what she wanted. That was her goodbye for me and from that day she shut down and was never herself again, except for the occasional spark when she would see her great granddaughter. The first time they met, their eyes locked and they just gazed at one another.
We changed my grandmother to a nursing home and she continued to go downhill until her death about two years after that first goodbye. While she always responded to my daughter, towards the end she didn't know who she was. I think at our last visits she thought I was my mum and my daughter my older sister.
At the time I couldn't fathom why she would just give up on life like that, but recently I've started to understand a bit of where her state of mind was and how it got to that point.
On her wedding day in Germany.
My grandmother was born 1916 in Breslau, which was East Germany at that time. She was born into a middle class family and her father was an eye surgeon. It would have been a full household with 5 other siblings. Then Hitler's Nazi party came into power. Lots of things changed, freedoms were lost and German families had to prove their German lineage by tracing their ancestry.
As a teenager she was knocked off her bicycle and temporarily lost her sight. While it was only temporary, over time she began having problems with her left eye and despite her father's best efforts, eventually lost her sight permanently in it. She used to wear glasses with one darkened lens by the time I knew her, to hide this eye from questioning gazes. The eye itself had developed a texture which looked like a shrivelled prune.
WW2 inevitably came and she was working for the red cross. She moved to wherever she was needed, wherever there were wounded. As “The Red Army” closed in towards the end of the war, German civilians fled from the East. My grandmother was in a convoy of sick and injured and the rest of her living family, one brother died in the war, were making their own journey, abandoning their home, never to see it again.
As the war came to an end, she was posted to Denmark. There she became sick and went to Switzerland to recuperate. I remember something being said about her being stuck outside of Germany without a visa to get back in. I guess that now Breslau was part of Poland again, her birth home was no longer classed as Germany. Some of her family was in West Germany and some trapped in the East, under new Russian rule.
While excluded from her home, she took an interest in anthroposophy and through this became pen friends with the man who would become her husband. After being parted from her birth family, she was in her thirties before she settled and started her own family in England with her new husband. The war was over, she was able to go back to Germany, where they had a second wedding and things were finally calm and peaceful.
Of her four children, only the youngest went on to make her a grandmother. It was just before I was to come earth side that her world was turned upside down again. My grandfather had a fatal heart attack and I believe that it was my pregnant mother who found him.
Her children had moved away from home and she was left rattling in this large house on her own again. So she got a couple of lodgers into the house and moved to Temple Lodge in London to work with her son. She threw herself into work and companionship, to keep herself going.
I was six when we moved back to our home town. We stayed for a while in my grandmother's house with the lodgers, until my father found work and we could get a council house.
I don't remember much of my grandmother from my early years. She'd visited us on occasion and I can remember a trip to visit her at Temple Lodge, when my sister and I came down with chicken pox and spent most of the visit in bed. Basically, I knew she existed, but I wasn't close to her.
At some point she decided to come back to her house and throw herself into helping out and being near her grandchildren. She was there for us when we were sick and my mum was working. We would have dinner at her house every Thursday evening. One of the lodgers continued to lodge with her for a while and he would join us for those meals on occasion.
She'd have what we called her secret society meetings with her anthroposophical friends. We called them that, because the door was closed on us when they started. She was involved with the Waldorf school we attended, helping many of the German teachers who came over to teach there to settle in, in a new country.
When my nephew was born, my sister lived with her as a lodger in the house for a couple of years and she got to help out with her great grandson. To him she was Oma; perhaps the first time she felt comfortable acknowledging her German self in a country which wasn't feeling fond of Germans after the war.
She couldn't drive, with her sight the way it was, but she'd go striding out to the shops, catching buses if she needed, often carrying bags full of glass jars and old newspapers for the recycling collection bins at the supermarkets.
Over the years her friends aged and died and her sight in her good eye started to fail her. Her hearing had been waning for a while and she got a hearing aid. One day she had a fall when she was out and broke a bone, which took a long time to heal. She started to go out less. Then she had another fall and break, which put her off going out at all. Her bed was moved downstairs. It was apparent that she was struggling and she finally acknowledged this, but what she really needed was to be with loved ones, not strangers. Her determination not to be a burden meant she made the wrong decision for herself.
It has become the norm to move apart from each other as families and I feel our mental health suffers for this. Various experiments have shown that the elderly fair much better when they have children and youngsters around them. They've found an improvement in mental and physical health of the elderly when they have started to have regular interaction with youngsters.
My mother-in-law has rheumatoid arthritis and gets bad flare ups every couple of months, which often take her to the hospital. When my 17 year old daughter went over to stay with her for 5 months, she didn't have a single flare up.
I realise my grandmother wanted to die, because she had nothing left to live for. While we loved her and wanted her there, we had our own lives that she didn't feel a part of. She'd fought through loss too many times before and I don't think she had another fight left in her.
I dearly wish she'd taken my mother's offer to have her at her house, rather than this depression being her last years of life. Yet I can see why she did it. She may have been able to acknowledge that it would be to her benefit, but would it have benefitted her family? Looking back, I can certainly say that while it may have added an extra workload, we would have been much happier than we were watching her drift away from us the way she did.