The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Disquiet

She is gone.

A soft, noiseless exit from a world that had let go of her hand and watched her float away.

I can't really explain why I'm having trouble stopping the tears, particularly since it is very unlike me. She and I were never close, though I wish we had been. I fell in love with her son when he was well into his forties and she in her eighties. I made her a granddaughter and for that, I think she was grateful.

It feels strange. The preparations you put into the anticipation of a loved one dying do nothing to distract the spread of shock as it works its way through the body and the mind. I can hear them all now: 'She was ninety, after all' or 'She had a nice, long life', and it will bother me. While both statements are true, the sorrow is not for her. Wherever she is, whatever kind of consequence of life waits for us all, there is someone missing her and he is taking on the suffering she left behind. I know that my daughter will never really know her, not that she had much chance of it before, but that there will be no lasting memories of her grandmother's voice or the way she liked to pull apart a panini sandwich. There will be no recollection of her cheeky humour, the way she laughed with the softer side of herself or the way her resolve was diminished whenever an animal came near.

I know she was supposedly a difficult, determined woman, that she had a way of detaching from sentiment and finding reason for everything. M. has been clear about this, just as he has been that she was wickedly funny and that her devotion to her friends was something special. I know that she missed her father terribly, that she never took off her wedding ring despite a very turbulent parting from M's father and I saw a sense of romance in that, a reluctant kind of poetry. It would be hard not to admire her, I think, no matter what sort of values a person may have. She was the kind of woman who painted pictures, who travelled wherever she wanted and who kept her secrets in places where no one will find them.

My reaction to her death is surprising to me, mostly because I am feeling a sorrow I haven't felt for people in my own family. I can't find the reason for it, but I don't suppose it matters much. I know M. will be reeling for days, now. The wait is over and the job is done. No more wondering, no more arranging her care. No funeral, as she'd once requested, only a simple cremation. Her friends are either dead or are living in foreign countries, so there will not even be a formal notice in the paper. This entry might be the only acknowledgment there is of the end of Isobel, a woman who liked to call herself Diana.

Goodnight, dear lady. Though there is no hymn being sung for you today, no box, no flowers and no line of black clad mourners, there is the stopping buzz of disbelief and a slow rolling wealth of tears.