Miriam 1900-2002
The first time I saw my great-grandmother Miriam was in my dream. My interrupted dream. I was in the middle of something, I don’t remember what, and she walked into the room fixing me with her very direct gaze.
She looked younger than she did the last time I saw her. That day, even with her face all padded up and powdered, lying in quiet repose in the soft, lavender casket, ageless. That face had no wrinkles, no creases, nothing that connected it with my great-grandmother, to be honest. Except the hat.
She wore a beautiful, extravagant hat of lace and feathers that perched jauntily just the way she would have worn it in life. My mother had insisted on it. Nothing represented grandma Miriam like an extravagant hat. Her love of hats was well-known and there was hardly anything that you could gift an old woman who had lived beyond eighty, ninety, a hundred years old that would hold meaning and bring as much pleasure as a hat gifted to grandma Miriam. So, she got hats.
And she would promptly rip them apart and painstakingly add her signature feather, maybe some lace, a bit of silk fabric…each one was a unique masterpiece. Not all her hats looked like an improvement on the original, at least to me, but they brought her so much joy. I loved them all because I loved her. She called me in to model her hats before, during and after the re-design process. Grandma Miriam was the first person that told me I was pretty. At the time it was fantastical, the exaggeration of an old woman who loved me – As I turned my head side to side modelling her creation in front of the wardrobe mirror, she sat back and with a smile, she said “With your face you would look pretty with any hat”. I grinned from ear to ear and I never forgot those words.
When she came into the room, everything else faded, she wasn’t a part of my dream, it was more like she arrived and made me aware that I had been dreaming. She didn’t move towards me, she merely looked at me. There was an intensity to her gaze as if she were willing me to understand. And I did.