An Alchemy of Words

Grandma's Gift

"Grandma's Gift"

Life, grandma,

         is a book of many pages

         and you have had the grace to live it

                       from cover to cover,

                                your fingers brushing

                                             every well-worn page.

This book of yours,

         this heady romance,

         this burlesque musical,

         this inspired comedy,

         this magical adventure,

                      has turned now

                             to loving tragedy.

But what has been read

                    is not forgotten;

         What has been lived

                             is never lost.

         You have underlined the passages, grandma,

                    and left us notes within the margins.

"Be strong," you tell us.

         "Find joy,

                     live life,

                            celebrate your beauty,

                     and say 'I love you'

         when it counts."

Because it does.

         Love matters.

         Joy matters,

                        and strength,

                               and beauty, too.

         Your life mattered, grandma,

                    and you have left your mark.

We are your granddaughters,

         our half-written journals

                       still full of potential,

                              of fresh white pages

                       lined with blue.

We will write in them, grandma.

         We will write your ink upon our hearts,

                     pen your wisdom into our lives,

                           underscore our memories of you with love.

You have given us our favorite book,

         one where we know every word by heart.

We won't forget you, grandma,

˗ˏˋ・。☆.・゜✭・.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
✫・゜・。.・。. ✭

Poets hold many roles within society. Perhaps it's because of my first job in the senior's home, or perhaps this is something that all poets experience, but I find people inevitably turn to me to speak at funerals or write words for them to speak. This poem was written for my wife and her older cousins to recite at their grandma's funeral. This grandma was the literary one, always with a book in hand, something off the shortlist of the latest prize in fiction.

What we didn't know that day was that Grandma took a secret to her grave. She always told her children they were Ukrainian but later, going through her things with Grandpa, there was a coffee mug with a grainy black-and-white photo printed on it. A group of scruffy men, defeated, were being escorted away by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. "That's her grandpa," Grandpa said. To my wife's confused questions about what the scene depicted, he simply responded, "Oh, I don't know," wiping away a tear. "Some sort of rebellion..."

And so began a personal journey of discovery for my wife. The rebellion was the Riel Rebellion and Grandma, it turns out, was Métis, one of Canada's three Indigenous groups, alongside the First Nations and Inuit. Her grandpa was married to Gabriel Dumont's daughter and fought at Batoche, near where I was born and where he farmed a small plot of land that extended out from the river bank.

Why the lie (or at least the adamant half-truth) about them being Ukrainian? Because in Canada, during the 1960's, being an Indigenous mother put you at significant risk of having your family torn apart, Social Services taking your children away to be raised in foster care or residential schools because of the brownness of your skin. It was called the Sixties Scoop.

The issue isn't simply historic, either, a product of some less enlightened age. To this day, Indigenous women in Canada report being medically sterilized against their will (and without their knowledge). Most recently, young Indigenous girls, some under the age of 10, report being coerced by social workers into having IUDs inserted.

Grandma was indeed part Ukrainian. Like her granddaughters, her skin was pale enough that she could pass as white. So she did what she needed to do to protect her children. She fled west and built a fiction that they could inhabit safely there together. But doing so meant cutting herself and her future children off from their cultural identity, their community, their place in history.

As for that photo, you'll find it hanging in the Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg. It's also blown up, larger than life, as you enter the historical exhibits at Batoche. Grandma's grandpa lies buried in the graveyard just outside. In the gift shop, you can still buy a coffee mug to remember him by.