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My Grandma’s Death is the Death of a Generation

Over the course of my life I have experienced the deaths of several family members. Thankfully, the majority of these have been both peaceful and at a “good age”. When my grandfather passed away at the age of 90, I was sad but not distraught; reflective but not distressed. Now, just under two years later, my grandmother - Grandma Ruth - is also dead. However, the end of her life marks the passing of more than simply a single person; it marks the death of so many memories.

At 96 years old Grandma Ruth was the last surviving member of her family, outliving all eight of her siblings. Likewise my grandfather; I have no grand-aunts or grand-uncles left. Indeed, to me her death marks the passing of a generation; the end of a lived connection to so many of my family and to our past.

Grandma Ruth was the last link to parents a well as several of her siblings; murdered in the Holocaust. In my Grandma’s lounge, now still and empty, there hangs two small black and white photos of her parents. This is how I think of her parents; as two motionless, posed figures staring out into the ether. For my Grandma however, they were the unique sounds of their voices and their particular mannerisms. For every story she shared with us about her childhood, there will have been many more that she did not; holding them in her mind’s eye as keepsakes of another time.

Grandma was also the last of my family to have been born in Germany, and to have fled on the Kindertransport, in search of safety. She was the last of my family to speak English with a German accent - though her English was impeccable - and my last living relative who learned English as a second language.

Grandma was the gatekeeper to memories of the post-wars years; a vessel containing her various interactions with her siblings and their families, as well as my grandfather and his parents and siblings. Whatever memories she did not share have died with her. Those stories that she did tell to us, are now reframed in their telling as second-hand accounts.

I could go on...

The past transcends the living through our recounting and passing on of memories. These memories, whilst not history, represent the past. However, it is a past limited to specific moments in time and to the people who lived through them.

Grandma Ruth, to me your death is a moment where I consider what of your life has transcended the past and what has sadly died with you.

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