Look dad!

Look Dad! It's us!

Your three little girls.

Look how proud she is of us. You can't see her, but I can feel her hands all over us in the very clothes we are wearing. She made them, no doubt out of a summer frock she'd made two seasons before.

Me and my little sisters. Look how cute we are! Three under three, she would always say when asked about her children. Three divided by three is one - we were split out of her and she knew it in sacred number somewhere deep in her comprehension of the universe.

I can only guess at this now - I can't talk to her about anything now. All gone.

If I catch her off guard and throw a question into a passing conversation about, say, the weather, she remembers us and she'll sing our names - Annette, Jennifer and Christine - but she can't connect that song of her body with us.

We are now just the echo of a strong vibration that passed though her but is now only a fleeting tune on the tip of her tongue.

I can't show her my grandchild. She doesn't event recognise me. I feel as if ancestral memory has been cut off  - it is as if memory works like a mirror. We can only know who we are by the reflection we perceive from an other. If our elders forget who we are, how can we possibly ever understand ourselves?

Just at the moment I need to know the next path on my emotional journey into grand-parenthood, her wisdom is gone. A resource I never knew existed till I needed it.