While I was my grandmother's caretaker, I learned how to put someone else first. It prepared me to be a good parent.
- My nan always took care of me growing up and made me feel calm. I wanted to do the same for her.
- In my late 20s, when her health started to decline, I helped take care of her.
My grandmother — who I call my nan — spent her early years scrubbing floors in an unheated house, and she was never in great health. Her knees creaked as she got up, and Parkinson's disease made it hard for her to maneuver around. Despite being in pain from arthritis, she was always helping others when I was a child. I didn't know then that one day I'd be the one helping her, or that she was laying the foundations for how I would parent my son years later.
She would do the ironing and washing up in a checked blue housecoat before walking down to the fish and chip shop to get dinner for my brother and me. While moving in constant slow motion, she would take care of all of us, and even cooked the whole family a full roast dinner every Sunday.
My nan was a source of calm for me
My nan was the youngest of eight children and was born into a working-class family in Derbyshire, a county in the North English countryside. She always said she had no choice but to "get things done." So when I was a child, I would stay at her house whenever my mother was overwhelmed.
There was something still and calm about her when my home life was chaotic. When my nan did her chores, I played around her feet; she was my port in the storm. One day I hoped to be that person for her, but it came sooner than I thought.
I started helping care for her in my late 20s
Despite her fighting spirit, she started to decline when I was in my late 20s. It was slow at first, but it sped up quickly, and her mobility was drastically reduced. We had to move her bed downstairs, along with her commode.
So that I could help take care of her, I changed my work hours to finish early on a Friday and spend the weekend together as often as I could. After two decades, we did the role reversal that humanity has known for generations. Just as she bathed and changed me, I bathed and changed her.
She had some carers who would come in to dress her, bring her meals, and put her to bed, and my family and I would fill in by taking care of her other needs the rest of the time. I would sit by her bedside in a quiet vigil, just listening to her breathing in and out, not knowing which would be her last.
Those moments helped me to prepare for her passing, and even though I'm a very anxious person, spending this time with her made me feel calm. It taught me lessons, as well. Every time I helped her go to the toilet, it taught me how to put someone else first, as well as how to communicate lovingly to someone who doesn't fully understand you.
The time I spent as her caretaker shaped how I parent
My nan died in 2014 and I had my son seven years later in 2021. Still, when I held him in my arms, I felt like he had a part of her spirit. His determination, curiosity, and sense of humor echoed hers as if no time had passed. It's easy for me to imagine them both together — him running around the house and her amused by his endless energy. There is such a profound connection between the young and the elderly, and I'm sorry to have missed seeing them together.
I think that caring for someone is a sense memory that never really leaves you and having my son only made that feeling stronger. It may be something of a cliché to say that I know how proud he would have made her, but that doesn't make it any less true. I hold onto that alongside my grief, and as well as she taught me about making someone feel safe.
I show my son the moon, the flowers, the birds in the sky, and all the other tiny beautiful details about life that only she would notice, and he loves all of it. It feels right to use that patience, care, and love that I built with her to look after him more lovingly than if I hadn't known her. Even though she's never met him, my nan gave me the great gift of making me a better mother.