...I found my place in the chain"
So I found out that my grandmother had a totally different history to the one she told and covered herself in like a security blanket. She married one man only, a merchant Navyman from Newfoundland, to whom she was married in 1949, I believe and to whom she was still married in 1989 when he died. And we never knew this, or met him. She was never married to her policeman, not that that matters, and she had no daughter. She had no daughter who died tragically. Her father was Frank Long, not Frank Cousins.
She constructed this mythology of herself as we all do, in one way or another, and I don't know that she didn't believe that it was all true. She seems to have been slightly "dillusional". But the thing is,,,I love her more for it. I am so glad I know this now, because I can know her better, and that makes me feel peaceful, not fearful, and filled with guilt about mistakes that I have made. She is more human to me now, I know she made misakes too, it helps me to remember her compassionate nature, and feel reconciled with her...And what a spinner of tales she was! Wow. I have to say I find her utterly remarkable, and I wouldn't have her any other way. She was truly unique, and she will enter the pantheons of all the mythologies of the lives that she has touched, I know that for a fact. I love her.
In the end she allowed me and those she loved into her world on all levels, wheher she wanted to or not, in a kind of postscript fashion, the "factual" and the "fictional" and this, though in some ways traumatic is perhaps the same baptism of fire we all go through in order to achieve intimacy. The journey through the view of the other by means of the story of the self...
"...Into this furnace I ask you now to venture, you whom I cannot betray"
Take care all of you, and get writing you lot... I'm cracking the whip, babies! I want to hear what you are thinking too...this isn't designed to be virtual onanism...I have a livejournal for THAT!!
lots of love.
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