Nana.

Nana always had a piano in her living room and, like pianos the world over, it had photos of family members on top. However, I don't remember ever having heard her play it. I'm sure she did - there was always a music score sitting above the keyboard - I was just never around at the time. Our family wasn't one to stand around the piano at Christmas time enjoying a sing-along. To be honest, now that I'm older and wiser (?), I realise our family wasn't much for getting together at all.

Nana lived by herself - my grandfather had died long before I was born - and in those days it was expected that you accepted widowhood as a consequence of marriage, and didn't attempt to seek out another's comapany. She lived in Auckland, one-hundred and eight miles south of us, so visits to her were sporadic at best. And I only ever remember her coming to visit us just the once.

I think I was about twelve-years-old when I last saw her. It was Summer, in the middle of school holidays, and we had travelled to Auckland to spend a week there, visiting the zoo, etc. We all had lunch at her house, outside on the back lawn, and I remember the smell of freshly baked bread mingling with that of the cold meat and salad, and the aroma of freshly mowed grass. Being a kid, of course, my only true focus was on filling my stomach, and adult conversation held no appeal for me. At some time, during our week in Auckland, my mother organised for herself to be ostracised from the rest of the family, and we were bundled in with her by association. But I remember that day as being a good one, and always will.

We had other holidays in Auckland, but we never saw Nana again. Every now and then some news would filter through to us about how the rest of the family was doing, and that's how we learned that Nana had been placed in a care facility after being diagnosed with dementia. She died about ten years ago, aged eighty-something, her mind scoured by Alzheimers, some twenty-five years since I last saw her.

I never got to hear her play the piano.

You know, I reckon with all the devices available for restraining a person's freedom, nothing could be as cruel, nor as binding, as the shackles placed on us by our own family.

Photo © Herman Krieger (Featured in the M.I.L.K. Collection)

"Nana" © Writing The Image/Peter Stone 2007