My Nanna

Hi all, I know its been too long since my last post - that'd be because of my thesis for honours and the fact that my last post applied to my everyday feelings - bloody honours!!!

Anyway, I wanted to write about the person who had been the biggest influence in my life, yet I only realised her influence in recent times. My grandmother (aka Nanna) is this person. I suppose I came to this realisation this year some time after she passed away. She died on the 23rd of November last year and it was such a sad time for our family, particularly my mum. They shared alot of their lives with each other and actually were both born on the 20th of december.

The thing I remember most about my Nanna are her hands. Despite their aged appearance and horrible nails, her hands were always so beautiful to me. When she would sit at the kitchen table at my home she would tell me these stories of her childhood or my grandfather and i would hold her hands and play with her wedding ring. The funny thing is that her hands were virtually the same size as my own (finger width, etc) despite her being over a foot shorter than I.
I also remember her laugh and her giddiness when she had anymore than a sip of wine! She also used to swear in Italian under her breath which my brothers and I found hilarious. It was funny how she would give my cat evil looks if her jumper of th table and even funnier that my cat would respond with an even cooler glare at her!

I suppose part of the reason she has truly been the biggest influence in my life (outside of the immunological community) is that she always told me not to take my comforts for granted. She herself was living in poverty in rural northern Italy for the first 13 years of her life and this only lessened slightly when she immigrated to northern Queensland. She dropped out of high school at 15 or 16 years old and always wanted her family to be educated and have all she didn't have.

Nevertheless, while she always pushed me to learn as much as I could, what I miss and love the most was how she loved everyone around her like we were her favourites. After talking to my brother about this I came to see that while i have always believed my Nanna and I shared a special and secret bond, my older brother felt the same way. I don't believe that lessened what we had, and it actually made me love her so much more. Nanna was someone that will live on not only through what i tell my children but what my brothers and cousins will tell their own kids...It sounds so stupid to write the above - that what i miss is how she made me feel, but her extraordinary talents resided in her capacity to love and forgive the horrible things we said to her or to each other - very few people can completely let go of their hurts, but she did.

I see a similar depth of love in my mum and hope that this is one thing that is heritable - perhaps as a mitochondrial residing gene that is latent until we have our own kids...ok that last part was slightly silly for the Vidyas of the world that read this...so ignore that if it is nonsensical and let me finish with a here endeth my most recent and very over due insane rambling!




Love you nanna!