Grandmothers are super-heroes
In Belfast, I uncover my grandmother's spirit through a poignant poem and a heartfelt conversation.
It’s June 2017 and I’m on a work trip to Belfast – it’s my first time in Northern Ireland and I’m feeling a little lost.
The city was beautiful but bruised, and the impromptu history tour we got from a sharp-eyed colleague gave me an insight into the fractured politics and complex divisions that years of news stories about the Good Friday Agreement, or childhood questions to my dad about his Red Hand of Ulster tattoo never quite expressed.
I felt ignorant, implicated, and overwhelmed. Away from the peace walls, the murals and the taxi-cab tours, I needed a drink. I wandered from the hotel and found a likely-looking pub.
Sitting outside in the pleasant mid-afternoon sun, I drank my pint of stout and fell into unexpected conversation with the bright-eyed American woman sitting on the bench next to me. It turned out she was an artist who was in Belfast for a performance of her spoken-word show, “Grandmothers are super-heroes”. As soon as she told me the title, my mind went to my two grandmothers who were both, indeed, super-heroes.
Six years before this conversation, we’d held the funeral for my mum’s mother, who’d finally died after long years of promising/threatening that she was about to go any minute. She was the definition of a matriarch: a mother of ten, with many dozens of grandkids, and an incredible legacy due to her powerful character, stretched-but-tender care, and her incredible way with a sharply accurate one-liner.
She was also kind of inscrutable, at least to me as a grandchild. My mum told me once about discovering secret poetry that her mother had written and hidden away, never spoken of. The mystery of who Nan really was, underneath the baking, the blunt but honest advice, the laughter and the frailty: it all came back to me when I was speaking with Rae, the American artist in Belfast.
I told her about the funeral: Nan had specifically asked for me and my mum to read a poem at the service, which neither of us had heard before: Sea-King’s Burial, by Charles Mackay.
I first read the poem on the morning of the funeral and was astonished at this bloody, defiant, Viking poem that my elderly grandmother wanted us to read at her eulogy:
My strength is failing fast (Said the sea-king to his men)
I shall never sail the seas – like a conqueror again,
But while yet a drop remains – of the life-blood in my veins
Raise, oh, raise me from my bed, put the crown upon my head
Mum and I read the poem between us as Nan’s casket stood nearby, and again I pondered the woman that I didn’t fully know, but felt I was starting to understand a little better now. What an incredible, defiant poem to go out on.
So I told Rae, the artist, this story as we supped our black pints of stout in the Belfast sun. She was enthralled and listened to every detail as I described Sylvia, my Nan. She vowed to read the poem aloud when she visited the Northern Irish coast on her few remaining days in the country, which I think Nan might’ve liked. I suddenly found myself feeling a small slice of home and familiarity again in this place which felt so alien to me, despite all the similarities to my usual haunts.
A few years after this Belfast encounter, I became a parent myself, and therefore my own mum became a grandmother – and as Rae said, they’re all super-heroes. All my appreciation for her as a parent became amplified tenfold by seeing her as a grandparent. Much like her own mother, she’s a matriarch too: a force of nature, a shining beacon of joy and support in literally hundreds of peoples’ lives. A super-hero, as Rae had it.
When my daughter was born in 2023, we gave her the middle name Sylvia, in remembrance of the original grandmother super-hero – a name we hope she’ll carry with pride and reverence. Rae told me after we met that I should “keep remembering her and her strength... it will help you and your mom feel stronger too, I am sure of it!” – and she’s right.
Addendum
I began writing this email with the intention to talk about the toxic men and their broken choices currently in the news: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Dominique Pelicot, Mark Zuckerberg and co. But I reflected that dwelling on the poor decisions and spineless, vapid actions of weak men wasn’t the best way to express myself. Let’s acknowledge the super-heroes, instead.
Mini-feels this week
The first shed update of 2025
In my shed/office, I have all my guitars mounted to the walls on two wooden battens. One of the battens was never quite mounted properly to the wall, and in the last month or so it’s started to make its way clear from the wall.
I resolved to use my newfound freedom (thanks, redundancy!) to fix it. Yesterday I went to the DIY store to buy a new batten, and today I took the old one off the wall. I quickly discovered I needed to return to the DIY store to buy new plasterboard fixings because the old ones were now unusable.
Once I started installing the new fixings, I realised I needed a saw-hole drill bit, which my current set didn’t include. Back to the DIY store.
I then discovered that the bolts I’d bought were the wrong type and—of course—didn’t have a screw-head. So I’m going to Screwfix tomorrow morning for another DIY product to hopefully stick a bit of wood on this wall.
The moral of this story? Never attempt to do anything, you’ll only make things worse.