T The Weight of Remembering

She held my hands when I was learning to walk. She dried my tears before I knew the words for sorrow. She tended my scars with quiet gentleness, and in the evenings she told me stories, folklore and fairy tales that shimmered in the half-light of the bedroom, until I believed the world might still be kind and magical.

She taught me resilience: how to stand tall even when your heart is a cathedral of aching. She placed herself between my father and the rest of us when his presence became a storm, shielding my sister, my mother, and me with nothing but the force of her will. She was there for the family always. Not sometimes. Always.

She was not the easiest woman to know when I was a teenager. There were silences between us that felt like weather, oppressive, damp, unyielding. But as I grew older, the distance closed, and we became the very best of friends. It is one of the great mercies of my life that we did.

When I was eight years old, she saved me. I had written a note saying I did not wish to live any longer. The weight of stress and dark emotions I felt about my father was too much for a child’s mind to hold. She found me with a knife, and she took it from my hand, then she sat with me, and she talked through my feelings as best she could. She was not trained in such things. She simply loved me enough to try.

She grew up during the Second World War. She watched childhood friends torn apart by gunfire, not in Hollywood movies, not in stories, but in the streets where she had played with her friends.

Then, as a teenager, she lived through the 1956 Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet Union, and she witnessed and endured its long, brutal aftermath. The fighting ended, but the repercussions never truly did.

She was never what one might call emotionally fluent. Her family had not cultivated such things. With eight siblings and two estranged parents, there had been no ground in which emotional intelligence might take root.

And yet I always felt safe in her company. She carried about her an air of grace and quiet authority that never faltered in all the years I knew her.

Even though she had lost our grandfather, a husband she loved dearly, not long before my sister and I were born, she poured everything she had into us. Every reserve of love, every fragment of energy. She gave it freely, without condition, without hesitation.

Years passed, and life was not kind to me. Stress and a succession of emotionally and physically abusive relationships took their toll. I lost several teeth, as a results of poor diet, anorexia, and abusive punches. This was a quiet, humiliating erosion that mirrored the erosion of my confidence and self-image. She noticed. Of course she noticed.

She offered me the money to visit the best dentist for a complete restoration. I still remember receiving my new teeth, how I wept, not from vanity, but from the overwhelming tenderness of someone who saw my ruin and answered it with repair. I shall never forget it.

I shall never forget the long hours we spent on the playground bench, chatting about nonsense and about all the important things of life, when I lived in a rented flat across the road from her. I shall never forget how devotedly she looked after my late dog, Lottie, when my work took me away from home for days on end.

I shall never forget that she took in my cat, Brandon, when I moved to England , which was a temporary arrangement, we said, though they never parted again. What was meant to last a few weeks became eight years of the most contented companionship. She called him the light of her eyes. Today, for the first time in all those years, they are not sleeping together on the sofa for their afternoon nap. Since she is in not well, for the first time, they are apart.

Now she lies in a hospital bed, fighting a war against dementia and cancer that she will not win. She will lose, for the first time in her extraordinary life. But it will be a legendary defeat, and I am fiercely proud of her.

And yet I cannot set aside certain memories of my mother. How she began to behave towards Mama as the dementia took hold. The impatience. The exasperation. The way she grew increasingly annoyed as Mama drifted between being a person with memories and a person with no personality at all, between presence and vacancy, between light and void.

How many times I listened to my mother’s obnoxious voicemails, cataloguing Mama’s failings, declaring that she hoped we would kill her should she ever end up the same way. What a thing to say. As though Mama had chosen to forget her memories, her personality, her life, her very existence. As though she enjoyed being a vessel of emptiness.

As though she chose to awaken after a fortnight of mental absence, frightened and bewildered. As though she had elected to hallucinate about her own dead mother, our great-grandmother, or to believe that her long-gone husband would walk through the door at any moment.

My mother had little patience and less compassion.

Now she feels guilty. Now she is full of regret. And because it is too late, she projects that guilt onto us, blaming my sister and me for leaving her alone with what she calls a burden. She forgets, conveniently, that I have built a life nearly two thousand kilometres away in England for the past eight and a half years, and that my sister left our hometown in 2013 to study jazz, a course of study Mama herself paid for, which led to the life of recognition and achievement my sister worked so very hard to earn.

In 2024, I walked a half-marathon for dementia patients, organised by the Alzheimer’s Society, and I dedicated the medal to my grandmother. When I placed it in her hands, she said something that has never left me:

“Please, do not forget how much I love you. Even though I will forget one day who you are, I will always remember and feel a deep love for you.”

My heart still aches when I replay that sentence. I can still picture her holding the medal. I can still see it placed above her bed, how proud she was that I had walked thirteen miles, twenty-one and a half kilometres, for her and for others who share her condition.

The Buddha once said: The root of suffering is attachment.

And it is true. The suffering of knowing I shall lose her, in days, weeks, or months, is almost unbearable. I go to work and behave as though everything is fine. I walk through streets, I sit at home, I carry on.

But deep beneath the surface, the grief is immense. It is sometimes a burning. Sometimes it is a cold so total it feels as though the furthest, most forsaken corner of the earth has settled inside my chest.

Sometimes it knocks the breath clean out of me. Sometimes it forces me to hold the air in my lungs until I am certain I shall suffocate. Love becomes a kind of exquisite torture when the one we love is being torn from us.

This is not melodrama. This is profound, legitimate grief for someone who shaped me, who saved me, who loved me without condition. And the Buddha was not wrong: the suffering is the price we pay for having loved so deeply.

#poem #farewell

Wass Albert - Búcsú

Már eltűnt régen a hajó Veled és én még mindég kendőt lengetek. s amíg távolba réved a szemem: arcod vonásait idézgetem. tengerverés csapdos a partokon: benne hangod zenéjét hallgatom. S a szélben, mely hajamba beletép, ott érzem még a kezed melegét.

De mindez búcsú már, tudom nagyon. Elnyel a távol, mint egy ősvadon. Pókok szövik be lépteid nyomát, holnapra új lakót kap a szobád, s elönt a hétköznapok bús sora, mintha nem is lettél volna soha… Csak én állok még itt. De már ködöt lehel a tenger árnyékod mögött, s míg lengetem a kendőm, lengetem: emléked lassan eltemetgetem.

In English:

The ship with you has long since disappeared and I’m still waving my handkerchief. And while my eyes gaze into the distance: I conjure up the features of your face. The beating of the sea laps at the shores: in it I listen to the music of your voice. And in the wind, which tears into my hair, I still feel the warmth of your hand there.

But all of this is farewell, I know it well.

The distance swallows you like wilderness. Spiders weave over the traces of your steps, tomorrow your room will have a new occupant, and the sad succession of weekdays floods over, as if you had never existed at all… Only I still stand here. But already mist breathes the sea behind your shadow, and while I wave my handkerchief, I wave: I slowly bury your memory.

#hungarianpoetry #poem

The line “as if you had never existed at all” feels particularly brutal right now, given how Mama’s existence, her pain, her symptoms were dismissed and erased by the medical system even while she was still lucid to complain about the maltreatment she received.

But she did exist. She does exist. And I am bearing witness to that , in my journal, in my memories, in my advocacy work, in my dissertation. I am making sure she won’t be erased, while I am alive. #legacy