“Old wives’ tales,” dementia, and piecing together the metaphysical enigma that is my grandmother’s life
“Y’know, my mother always told me that gin would make you blind, and that’s also what Äiti (Äiti means “mother” in Finnish, but has become synonymous in our family with my great great grandmother’s name) said to her, so I’ve never touched a drop of the stuff in my life!” My grandma has said something like this to me at least a hundred times in the last five years. Typically followed by an assurance along the lines of, “Besides, we’re Finns. We drink vodka.”
It’s actually quite a funny thing for her to say. First of all, because I myself am visually impaired regardless of any occasional consumption of gin, and secondly, because I cannot bring myself to believe that the cosmopolitan phenom of a woman that is my grandmother has never even tried gin. However, regardless of validity, “gin will make you blind” is the sort of story that I have been fortunate enough to inherit from the woman, dating back to conceptions of foreign “North American” alcohols from my ancestors a century ago when they first arrived in Northern Ontario. Maybe Äiti did not think that gin would literally make you blind, but a fear of losing her family and culture in a strange new land is a sort of blindness all the same.
Stories like this are the sort of childhood oddities that have been reawakened by my grandma’s progressing dementia in the last few years. They cut through the fog of her mind and keep both memory and our family together and alive; both now and across generations. There are people who would disregard the stories my grandma tells as “old wives’ tales” or delusions, and, to an extent, that is fair. Most of the stories she tells through the haze of her dementia are outright ridiculous. She claims to have known Doug Ford as a baby: “He was a scoundrel back then too, I’ll tell you that!” While hilarious and poignant, that is simply untrue.
Other stories of hers create inconsistencies in her life. For example, she used to hate tattoos—all tattoos. Cut to about three years ago, we were out for dinner and she struck up a whole conversation with the waiter about how much she loved her tattoos and how they reminded my grandma of others she had admired while travelling throughout South East Asia. I didn’t know she had been to that part of the world—maybe she hasn’t. Still, it was remarkable!
There is also the opposite phenomenon, where she is now unable to remember or explain some past detail of her life that I discover. For instance, I spent the summer after first year cleaning out her old house that she had just moved out of after 30 years. I found so many rarities, oddities, precious family heirlooms, and more, but certainly one of the most unique findings was that the sole occupant of the top drawer of her desk was a pristine pocket-sized edition of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. Why on earth…? I was speechless. It was hilarious; it was senseless. Our family had fled to Canada from war with the U.S.S.R.. But, of course, when I asked her about it, she had no words. “Why would I own communist literature? You didn’t find that in my house!”
All this to say: my grandma’s stories can be insane. Undertaking the task of trying to piece together a coherent narrative of her life can feel like trying to catch a cloud and pin it down. But I don’t think any of her stories should be disregarded. They paint a complete picture of the woman. Occasionally, in a way that can be easily spun into a factual and chronological account of her life, but, more interestingly, in a way that captures the true essence and spirit of who she is: a vivacious, cuttingly funny, wickedly intelligent, unceasingly kind, and excellent story-teller of a woman.
Of course, a factual and abridged account of Lynda’s life could go something like this: In the spring of 1944, while her husband was off fighting German U-boats in the war, my great grandmother, a Finnish immigrant who had come to this country fleeing a different war, gave birth to my grandma. They lived in a neighbourhood of fellow immigrant families in Thunder Bay, Ontario, with no running water or electricity. My grandma took in at least one of every kind of stray animal she could find and convinced her mother to let them into the house. Across the street from the cacophony of dogs, cats, canaries, turtles, lizards, rabbits, hamsters, fish, and mice, Äiti ran a boarding house for Finnish woodsmen who would regularly tear apart the whole neighbourhood in drunken stupours. Lynda lied about her age to get her first job at fourteen (selling different lengths of wire), and eventually had saved up enough to leave her life of roughin’ it in the Northern Ontario bush behind. She moved to Goderich, Ontario, on the southeastern shore of Lake Huron where she drove a bookmobile. That’s also where she met her first husband, a magazine photographer who would use her as a model in his beauty and fashion shoots. Eventually, she left Goderich and her husband for Toronto, got a job with the airlines, and met my grandfather while travelling in the Caribbean. They had a couple of kids and lived wherever his work took them. They had a fair amount of money, a fair amount of happiness, and a lot of fun: she claims she could spy on Pierre Trudeau and his “mistress” from their house across the street while living in Montreal in the 80s—almost all of the stories from my dad’s childhood are her pulling these sorts of shenanigans. They finally settled down (relatively speaking) in the suburbs outside Toronto, where she became the Grandma in the Grandma’s house that I knew. Still wild, letting me tag along on her travels and adventures, but settled into “Grandma life” nonetheless. But an account like this of my grandma’s life can only scratch the surface of the depths of her character without the added colour of how she tells her story. What she has constructed, even amidst the fog of dementia in this late stage of her life, is a vibrant mosaic of an oral history of both herself and our family. And yes, some of that mosaic can be surmised as “old wives’ tales” along the lines of gin-blindness and baby Doug Ford, but that’s still an accurate assessment of who she is, the people she came from, and the people she has raised up in this world. The stories we have are who we are throughout all time and memory, so maybe gin won’t make you blind, but why shouldn’t we say it does?