Patricia Anne Smith neé Lee (better known as Nanny Pat) passed away on Friday, March 11, 2011. She is missed by all her family, but her granddaughter Molly Lee misses the relative she lost as a child.
I’m at my Nanny Pat’s house, sitting by her bedside with the biggest smile on my face.
My baby teeth are falling out, so my smile is full of youth, innocence and massive, massive gaps. I have my Nintendo DS in my hand and I am wearing a dark pink jumper with a cat on it. Nanny Pat’s hair is silver, her body is frail, and her smile radiates her cheeky personality. It’s unusual to describe people in their 50s as cheeky. But she was cheeky.
Although we are both smiling, she’s in a hospital bed in her home. She has Multiple Sclerosis (MS). This isn’t a memory I have. I was too young. It’s a photograph I have on my bedroom wall to remember her by.
On Friday, March 11, 2011, Patricia Anne Smith né Lee, my Nanny Pat, passed away after a 19-year-long battle with MS. She was only 52 years old.
MS is a lifelong condition where your immune system mistakenly attacks the brain and nervous system. There’s no cure. And it’s what made me experience grief and loss at the age of seven.
Loss and grief are emotions everyone experiences at some point in their life. People grow old. They die. It happens. It happens all the time. We all know this. But my first experience was at such a young age that I mourn a nan who I don’t remember.
I don’t know and never will know the sound of her voice or how she would say my name. I don’t know the sound of her laugh or of her singing her favourite songs.
Her face I only know from photographs in our family photo albums or in the frames hanging on the wall. I know her cheeky personality from talks with family members and her best friend, Sylvia. She was such an energetic and funny woman who would embarrass my mum by dancing and running with trolleys in supermarkets.
My Nanny Pat was beautiful, inside and out. I just wish I could remember it for myself.
Do we remember moments from our childhood, or do we just think we do? We are told about our childhood again and again by others so there’s always this nagging doubt in your mind about whether your memory is real, or someone else’s description.
Whenever I’d go over to her house in December, she’d give me a chocolate from the little Christmas tree next to her hospital bed in her living room. She had dogs, Teddy and… I can’t remember the other one’s name. She had loads of ceramic dog ornaments – two of which sit in my childhood bedroom. She had a stairlift in the garden as she couldn’t go up the steps.
The clear memories I have aren’t the happy ones. No memories of seaside holidays with her, or of countless sleepovers. I remember my dad sitting me down and telling little me the doctors think my Nanny Pat might only have a few weeks left to live. I remember staying at my other nan’s house during the week Nanny Pat took her final breath.
The day she died, my parents came and picked me up. Just looking at my mum’s tear-stained face, I knew. She was gone. And then there was her funeral.
Funerals aren’t a nice thing to go to – especially as a child. I don’t think you can fully understand funerals at such a young age. I remember crying, placing a rose on her closed coffin as we left and the wake at her house afterwards, but I don’t think I was ever fully aware we were mourning her death.
Yellow daffodils are engraved on her memorial plaque at the crematorium. They were one of her favourite flowers. The yellow so bright, full of life and bloom in the spring – the same season we lost her. On my right wrist, as a permanent reminder of her, is a coloured tattoo of a daffodil.
I can’t help myself wondering would she be proud of me? What would she think of my journalism course? Is she sitting up in heaven looking down on me with a smile as I’m writing this column about her?
I never grew up to the natural point where you stop saying Nanny and replace it with Nan. She’s forever my Nanny Pat, even though I’m an adult.
