Mrs. Chan used to have geraniums over the sink, Mum tells me on the phone. And a cat who was not allowed in the kitchen. A Russian Blue cat, she specifies. A few days after the phone call I can’t remember the name of the cat, but Mum would have. Mum has always had an incredible kind of memory. The type that still remembers the exact date on which her own cat had kittens when she was just an eight-year-old child.

She had just been back to Ontario, to visit her mother. Nana had been moved to a more advanced wing of the Care Home. It had grown impossible to have conversations over the phone, the words had evaporated recently. In their places were sighs and laughs – the oh-so-familiar wordless expressions. The dip of the voice, almost guffawing, when agreeing heartily. The beautiful up-trill that seemed bred into the Bedfordshire accent. The ebb and flow of communication in a few sounds, as if words had been worn thin, threadbare, fallen to dust under all the use of the decades. A couple of solitary words, orphaned phrases, were left scattered here and there. The words she had likely uttered most often still remained: “How lovely.” Mum had been keeping up both sides of the conversation from her kitchen, recalling names and places and sending them back over the line – a curator of shared moments and family history.

The first day it took some time for her to recognize the face, the new arrival, Mum says. The second day, she walked in the door to be surprised by that familiar voice, loud with pride and authority: “Now, this one’s my daughter!”

I could hear the way Nana would say it, much like the way she introduced me at the Legion that sticky summer day when I was in college: “This one’s my granddaughter!” And then, casting her eye about the room of grinning elderly men shrewdly, “So everyone had better just behave.” Blond, tall, dressed in shorts and strappy heels on a Thursday afternoon, a full laugh that burst out after the half-beat following her sentence: that is my Nana.

***