In Loving Memory: A tribute to my grandmother

An Essay by Patricia Falvey, author of The Yellow House

When I was eight years old my mother came and stole me. She came, a perfumed, smiling stranger, and took me without preamble or warning from my grandmother’s house and smuggled me to a strange land across the sea. Left behind in Northern Ireland were the only home I had ever known, and the only family I had ever known – my beloved sister and grandmother.

In the immediate days that followed, I stood outside the unfamiliar house in England where my unfamiliar parents lived, and stared up towards the sky at the airplane that flew overhead once each day. Surely very soon I would be on one of those planes, flying back to the safety and love of my grandmother.

But it was not to be. I saw her only once after that, on the occasion of my sister’s wedding. I was fifteen then, and it was she who had now become the unfamiliar stranger. The stooped old woman with the bad eyesight no longer resembled the tall smiling woman of my childhood with her silver hair wrapped in braids like headphones around her ears and who smelled faintly of snuff. I never saw her again. By the time I had immigrated at age twenty to the United States she had died. I never even knew where she was buried.

Time can either erase events from memory or intensify them. As I grew older in this new world of America images of my years in England faded while my memories of Ireland grew ever stronger. And as those memories grew so did the tear in my heart that had ruptured the day I’d been taken away. Without any conscious awareness on my part, my spirit began leading me on a journey to mend that tear. My trips to Ireland became frequent. My sister and I drew closer. And my grandmother’s voice grew stronger.

Through that voice the echoes of her stories grew louder and clearer. I began to put her words down on paper and eventually my novel, The Yellow House, began to take form.  As I wrote each chapter, I heard her voice over my shoulder. The stories came naturally as I heard again her memories of her life during the Irish Uprising. The title came naturally too as I recalled again her fond recollections of the beloved Yellow House in which she had been born. Without my realizing it, the novel had become a tribute to her memory. I dedicated the book to her.

Still, something told me I was not finished. And so, on a recent trip to Ireland I found her grave, neglected and forlorn in a small village cemetery. My sister and I erected a headstone. “In loving memory of our grandmother” it reads. Every time I look at a photo of it now I feel a peace reaching out across a half a century and healing my heart.