Families

My partner's aunt has died suddenly. She was 86 and had been in ill health but it was still a shock. She was one of the sweetest, gentlest women I have ever met. Her English was stilted (she was part of the Belgian side of the family) and it was difficult for her to communicate because of her poor English and her deafness but, still, she always had an aura of calm and safety.

She was remarkable for she married an Englishmen just after the war and bore 14 children. Three babies died but 11 survived and she has spent her later years surrounded by a huge family of her own children, grand children, great grandchildren and even great great garnd children. The experience of raising this huge family --- often alone since her husband had to work nights and was asleep in the day --- seems to have equipped her to face any situation with tranquillity and a smile. She glided through life like a swan. Her passing marks the end of that particular generation of the family so it is a really momentous event in the family.

In one way all this is by the by. She was my partner's aunt and so I am not directly related, but what it does signal is how long my partner and I have been together and my own sense of ageing and mortality.

When I first met the aunt she was in her late 50s --- not much older than I am now --- and it makes me realise that the lives of my partner and I are entwined through so many experiences; joyful and sad, the births of our own children and others in the family, the deaths of family and friends, the places we've lived, the people we've known.

I seem to have come to a place where I realise the richness of being alive past my half century and managing to maintain a relationship for over half that lifetime. I wonder how we do it when so many people we know are divorced or separated. We recently looked at old photos with our children and realised that every other couple in those photos, bar one, was now apart. It's not luck and it's not good fortune. It's not 25 years of roses round the door and sunshine. Maintaining a relationship with anybody over that long a period is a real commitment and necessitates hard work, endurance, the ability to change, be flexible, know when to say something and when to keep quiet.

When I think about the marriages of my parents and my partner's parents I see that partly the skills have been learnt from them. They were both married for over 40 years --- but we live in a very different age with different demands and expectations: roles are not so clearly defined, children are not so biddable. The lifestyle that we Baby Boomers were promised --- of living in silver jumpsuits, eating pills for food, robots for every task, bags of leisure time ---has not materialised. Instead everybody seesm to work harder, rush hither and thither crammig ever more activity into their lives and if any free time materialises many people focus on the pursuit of acquisition --- new clothes, new gadgets, more holidays, more 'entertainment' ....more 'stuff'.

If you knew me in RL you'd know that I am not conventional in many ways --- never have been and cannot be --- and yet somehow we seem to be raising our children in a very traditional situation where we all have the same surname, have lived in the same place for many years and are part of a community. I don't know if this is better or worse than growing up in a situation where there are other half or 'half-half' siblings; where sections of several families interweave to provide a more complex tapestry through which to support the children through their development. I do hope that somehow we can endure and come to old age like the Belgian aunt who had seen it all and more and glided through life like swan