Somersaults on a washing line

 Viollanda, my ex-mother-in law of 20 years, was nearly 90 when she passed away some weeks ago. 

What a woman. She had 12 children, ten of whom survived. As a girl she hid in a hen coup while soldiers rounded up the men of the village and set fire to them in the church - at least I think this is what I understood her telling me, as we communicated in broken Greek and Albanian. She had no formal education and an arranged marriage to boot, but possessed boundless love, wit and determination, surviving a very difficult domestic life and incredible poverty, for decades. And she loved me like a daughter, even after I left my ex-husband. 

I am so fortunate to have known and been close to her. I have many wonderful memories (and photos and film footage) of her: singing and cooking, holding my hand and talk-talk-talking, pretending to be a servant rushing to make her husband’s coffee, screaming with delight next to me in the car when I drove through Sarandë on the wrong side of the road after getting it fixed. (The gear pedal came off in the Albanian mountains close the border with Greece following a mammoth drive from Bristol to Venice and then a ferry journey to Igoumenitsa, one summer.) 

A few nights before she died, I dreamt about her: she was in her raggedy nightie and undergarments, doing somersaults on the washing line that hangs off the balcony outside their flat. I was begging her to climb back in, so afraid for her. But she was laughing and spinning and, as ever, displaying her strength and resilience. 

She had been bed-bound for over a year and I think she came to me in this dream to tell me that she would soon be set free. I think perhaps also to send me love and strength, and perhaps remind me of the qualities we have in common - which I now think were perhaps the source of our special connection, which all the family were so generous in acknowledging when I called them after the funeral. It turns out she’d asked to speak to me the evening I dreamt about her, but the family didn’t realise how soon the end would come.

Viollanda would always give me a bar of soap for the journey back to England or Greece, after our visits to Albania. She didn’t have much else to give. Sometimes a plastic bottle filled with honey, or a bunch of mountain chai.

My eldest son went to Albania for the funeral with his dad. Met cousins he barely knew existed, in the rite of passage of a lifetime; it’s not every day a matriarch like his yaya passes away. 

I gave him a bar of Bronley’s best, that they put in the casket with her, for her final journey. Lily of the Valley. I so wish I could have gone to the funeral with them.