Eulogy Writer

My grandmother was called Sheila, but I don't think I ever heard anyone call her that. Everyone was 'love.' The postman was love. The man who came to read the gas meter was love. I was well into my twenties before I realized that wasn't my actual name. She was born in Bolton in 1935. Left school at 15 and went straight into the cotton mill, because that's just what you did. Later she spent 30 years as a dinner lady, same primary school the whole time, which means there are people all over [her town] in their forties and fifties who still remember Sheila putting an extra spoonful of something on their plate because she thought they looked like they needed it. She fed everyone. That is not an exaggeration, it is just a fact of how she operated. You did not leave her house without eating something, and if you tried, she would find a reason to stop you at the door. There was a biscuit tin that was, as a matter of household law, never allowed to be empty. I don't know who enforced that law. I think she just enforced it on herself. She was married to my grandad Frank for 54 years, until he died in 2019. After that, she kept going to their Tuesday tea dance. On her own. For two more years. I think about that a lot, actually. Getting dressed up on a Tuesday and going to the place you used to go together, and dancing anyway. That takes a particular kind of nerve that she never once described as brave. It was just Tuesday. She was terrible with directions. Properly terrible. There's a family story, and I'm told it's completely true, about the time she set off to drive to Southport and ended up in Blackpool instead, and rather than turn around and admit defeat, she just decided that was where she was going all along and made a day of it. That was very her. If the plan went wrong, the plan was wrong, not her. She did the crossword every single morning. In pen. No pencil, no second-guessing, no crossing out. If she got one wrong, she got it wrong in ink and that was that. And she was stubborn, in this quiet way that you wouldn't notice unless you were paying attention. When the council tried to close the library, she didn't shout about it or organize a protest. She just wrote them a letter. And then another one the next week. And the week after that. For a year. One woman, one letter at a time, and the library is still open. She taught me how to make her pastry. Wouldn't write the recipe down, not once, no matter how many times I asked. She'd just say you have to feel it. I used to think that was her being stubborn again, or maybe just enjoying keeping a bit of mystery. Now I think she genuinely believed some things can't survive being written on a card. They have to be handed over, hands over hands, at the counter, again and again, until they're yours too. I still don't make it quite like hers. I don't think I'm supposed to. She had three children, seven grandchildren, four great-grandchildren. That's a lot of people who got called love. That's a lot of people who never once left her kitchen hungry. She died at home in April, at 91. I keep thinking about that tea dance, her on her own on a Tuesday, and about the letters to the council, one a week, patient as anything. She was not a loud person. She never needed to be. She just kept showing up, kept feeding people, kept writing the letters, kept doing the crossword in pen like she already knew the answers were going to be right. I'm going to miss being called love. I don't think anyone else is allowed to do it quite the same way. Goodbye, Grandma. Thank you for the biscuits, and the pastry, and every single letter you never stopped writing.