Ivy Maud Cooper - 1909 - 2006

My grandma died last week, her funeral was this week. She was 97, after a healthy old age she broke her hip in a fall at the start of the summer and declined from there. It wasn’t unexpected when I got the call, I was at the top of Pillar in the Lake District when I heard. My feelings were stoical and practial; I was sad without being upset, knew that she was ready to go and glad that she wasn’t in pain any more.

The funeral hit everyone a lot harder than we were expecting. My extended family only really get together at events, but for years, decades now, the events have only been weddings. There were a lot of tears for the only surviving member of a generation of one family. My job was to read a poem, I didn’t do so well, I hadn’t expected the massive wave of emotion that swept through the crematorium, when I was practicising the poem in the kitchen a few days earlier. The peom was Song by Christina Rossetti.

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as it in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise not set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

My grandama had a good life, I knew very little of it. I knew an old lady who had all her marbles and a few more, a cracking sense of humour, a genuine interest in people and life and a love of strong cheese sandwiches. My mum had put up a display of old photos. They were fantastic, images of a person that I’d never connected with my grandma before; a young couple wearing swimming costumes, on a beach with their daughter. A group of friends in 1930’s tennis whites, posing with their rackets. A young woman being given a piggy back by her husband.