Source: Guardian >> Read full article and comment
Maggie Gee didn’t really believe her parents were mortal till her father died and her mother, too, six months later. She treasures their times together and hopes that when the time comes, she’ll leave her own daughter with memories of love
Maggie Gee
The Guardian, Saturday 29 May 2010
In a new memoir, My Animal Life, I have written about sex, motherhood and death. How very slow I was to understand them. Largely because I once lived in my head, myopic about most of what mattered. I married late, had a child even later: one beloved daughter, Rosa, when her father and I were in our late 30s – and yet, in a way, Nick and I were still children, because you can be a child, until you have a child, and then you learn you are part of a chain.
It is a very lucky person who manages to grow up with two living parents. Naturally, as one of the lucky ones, I had managed not to realise that they would die. Ever since I was small, I had adored my mother, Aileen, a dark-haired, gypsy-ish, vivid woman who loved books and jokes and deferred to her husband. Rosa was my mother’s first granddaughter: she had five beloved grandsons, and would later have six, but Rosa would always be the only girl, just as I had been Mum’s only daughter. When we went to see my parents, in their Norfolk bungalow, Rosa would eat lunch on her grandma’s lap, and even in summer Mum would do a Christmas pudding, because she knew that Rosa loved it… Continue reading
