Nonna

On 13th August, my nonna died. For those of you less well versed in the Italian language, ‘nonna’ means ‘grandmother’. Nonna was my grandmother, and for most of my life she was my only living grandparent. She was a force of life and now she is gone.
It has taken me several weeks to be able to write this piece. When someone I love dies, I always want to honor their memory by writing something about them, but this time it has been more difficult to gather my thoughts. I’m not sure why, except to say that gathering my thoughts about Nonna is akin to trying to do a pen-drawing of the moon. Not only does it mean trying to convey an immense and complex entity in just a few simple words, it also means making sense of all that she meant to me. That isn’t easy when she has just always been there.
But I need to start somewhere, so let me start with the woman who championed me joyfully and relentlessly at every turn. When I visited Nonna for the last time, her gradually fading brain was sometimes more in the past than the present, and she spent a lot of time reminiscing about the earliest years of my life – the time when my family discovered I was blind. She described those years as ‘all those ups and downs’, and in talking to my parents I know that the downs were significant. Yet she spoke joyfully of how we had all come through that time. I can’t say I remember it, but I will never cease to be grateful for the dedication my family showed in not letting my blindness get in the way of living life (theirs and mine) to the full. And since that day, the very blindness that had brought so much sadness became a cause for celebration for my indomitable Nonna. She would vaunt my achievements to anyone who would listen, considering them all the greater because I had had ‘so much to overcome along the way’. I always intended this to be an honest piece, so I will confess I often found that difficult. I didn’t want to be the odd one out … the one who had special needs … the one whose achievements were deemed so much more remarkable because of being blind. I just wanted to be me … one of the crowd. But you fast learn that life as a disabled person will never accord you that, and so you learn to appreciate the appreciation 🙂 And if I was going to have to be lauded by anyone, then I couldn’t ask for better than Nonna. She genuinely believed I could do whatever I set my mind to, and she struggled to believe I could ever put a foot wrong. We argued often on that point – me pleading desperately that I am only human, and she reassuring me that I would get everything right! Crazy but very lovely of her!
Mind you, she was always prepared to help in enabling her family to thrive and succeed. She prayed daily for every single one of us, and I have often commented that we had relatively straightforward adolescences as a result … Oh, we each had our teenaged rebellions of a minor sort, but Nonna’s two daughters and five grandchildren stand today with faith in tact and lives overflowing with blessings. We owe much of that to her covering us daily in prayer and lavishing us with faith, hope and love. 
Prayer was a bit of a thing for her. I remember how absolutely thrilled she was when I became The Salvation Army’s national prayer co-ordinator, in one fell swoop uniting two of the great passions of her heart – namely prayer and The Salvation Army. Again, in the interests of honesty I would have to confess that this sometimes caused problems … every single phonecall, every single visit, every single encounter with her became another work meeting for me, as she grilled me on what we were doing to build up prayer in the movement and as she offloaded her own joys and frustrations over how her local church was prioritising prayer (or not). What I wouldn’t have given for a more restful topic of conversation, especially as these debriefs usually occurred when I was on holiday or trying to enjoy a rare day or two away from the office! But you can’t work in the field of prayer for very long without knowing that God has a habit of planting a few prayer fanatics around the place, just to make sure we don’t lose sight of how vital it is. Nonna was one such prayer nutter … as am I … and it is a mantle I am delighted she carried.
I suppose one of the things prayer does is to give you very high standards about life in general. If you are daily living and praying the belief that impossible things can happen, and that even the worst situations can be turned around, then it can become anathema to you to accept things which are less than ideal. Praying people tend to need to find a balance between expecting and accepting, wrestling and resting. Dare I say I’m not sure Nonna ever quite grasped the accepting and the resting 🙂 She fully expected her prayers to be answered, and she wrestled until they were. Her faith in God was simple but unassailable. If something needed to change, we should pray until it changed. In her latter years particularly, this determination didn’t always serve her well. She found it harder and harder to accept things which weren’t quite as she thought they should be. I remember ending up in a fierce row with her once – the only row we’ve ever had – and it revolved around her seeming inability to accept people and things for what they were. She constantly wanted people to be doing better than they were. She constantly wanted things to be further ahead than they were. I remember exploding in my exasperation, right there in the middle of Orlando Airport: “Nonna, where’s the grace?!!!!”  
In fairness to her, she was no hypocrite. She extended that same rather perfectionist attitude to herself as well as to everyone else. One of the other things she kept telling us on our last visit to her in hospital was that she kept having to take herself in hand for being so ungrateful. Apparently she would find herself awake in the early hours, feeling anxious about life and all that was happening to her, and, in her own words, she would “smack” herself, telling herself to snap out of the misery and to be grateful for the knowledge that God loved her. Given the demonstration which accompanied the spitting out of that word “smack”, I rather think she was doing it a lot! She wasn’t a woman to cut herself any slack. 
She was such a dogged lady in so many ways. She had the Latin feistiness that is so often associated with the Italians, and in her case it translated into a solid and unswerving devotion to God, to her family and to the Salvation Army churches she led. She was tireless, right to the end. During that last visit to her in hospital on her 91st birthday she spent a lot of time telling us how she just wanted to be back in her routines so that she could get on with being useful to God again. She certainly lived the old Salvation Army adage that we are here on earth to work and serve with all our strength, until we literally can’t work and serve anymore, at which point we get promoted to glory. Nonna was probably one of the most hard-working people I have ever met. 
Nonna was a woman who worked and prayed, prayed and worked. I once heard someone giving some teaching on prayer and he proposed the idea that we could outlast the enemy … that we could persevere for so long and with such faith that the enemy would simply give up on opposing us in the end! If that could be said of anyone, it could certainly have been said of Nonna. I rather like the idea that the powers of darkness might simply have given up on her out of sheer exhaustion! 
What will I miss? I will miss the affection she always showed us. I won’t exactly miss the means by which she expressed it: grabbing hold of me and planting endless kisses on me (no one had taught her that important lesson about not imposing physical contact on another human being :)) – but I will miss the loving and compassionate way she always greeted and treated us. I remember an occasion, just a few years ago when Canterbury Salvation Army did a performance of the musical “The Blood of the Lamb”. Nonna came to see it, and as I emerged from backstage at the end, all I could hear was her strident voice singing “There’s only one Lyndall for me!” In a broad Italian accent! She was always so overjoyed to see us and that was wonderful. 
I will miss her ever-enquiring mind. Whenever I saw her, she would ply me with questions on everything from the state of The Salvation Army to the methods of training guide dogs. You could tell she had been thinking about all sorts of things. 
I will miss the humour. She loved a good chuckle and she wasn’t afraid to laugh at herself too. 
I will miss her phenomenal memory for people. She loved people and she cared what happened to them. She was forever telling us the stories of other people’s lives and engaging our help wherever it was needed. I’ve lost track of all the students who were coming to study in Canterbury who she wanted me to look out for. Even when she had started forgetting things, she would still remember people and their lives, and would still be able to ask the kind of questions which can only be asked by someone who has really listened. 
What do I wish for her now? Just one thing really: I hope and pray she now knows how very loved she is by God, and that she has stopped smacking herself!