Alice
It’s International Women’s Day. My maternal grandmother Alice, is what my friend Nancy would have called a ‘dame’. A smoke in one hand, a glass of gin the other, she was always up for an adventure. Raucous, obstinate, and fiercely funny, she made an indelible impression upon anyone who met her. When I introduced her to one of my university boyfriends, Saeed, she looked at him, shook his hand, and observed matter-of-factly: “So, you’re a Paki.” To his credit, she amused him. She apparently had no idea the correct term was Pakistani.
Her life was forever altered in 1918, when her mother Blanche, 25 years old and pregnant with her third child, died of influenza; Alice was barely four years old. She herself had also been ill with the so-called Spanish Flu and was hospitalized in the same room as her mother. When it became evident that Blanche would not recover, nurses moved her from the shared room so young Alice would not witness her mother’s death. My own mother told me that Alice woke one morning to find her mother’s bed empty and began to roam the hospital corridors searching for her. Alice and her younger brother Louis were promptly sent back to their native Quebec from New Bedford, Massachusetts where their father was working at the time. In those days it was not uncommon for widowers with young kids to give them up to close relatives or perhaps to orphanages, as single men were not expected to work and simultaneously raise their children. An aunt and uncle took in Alice and her two year old brother Louis.
When I was younger and these stories were shared with me, I could not conceive the trauma. I listened with a mixture of curiosity and awe, not letting myself get too close to that pain. I often think about my grandmother, the dame, Granny as we called her. What would she think about this? What would she have done about that? What insults would she heap upon this person in this situation, never one to back down. She could be so intimidating and downright nasty at times. She certainly inflicted her share of pain upon her husband and my mother in particular. Stories for another day. And yet her easy laughter, her unpredictability, and her abandon always fascinated and inspired me. And they continue to do so, long after having lost her. When I do think of her, it is always through the lens of the loss of my great-grandmother to the Spanish Flu and how profoundly this would change the trajectory of Granny’s life, in turn my mother’s, and my very own. A trauma so significant that it is felt for generations.