Writing a tribute to a grandmother

The risk with a grandmother is the archetype. Warm, patient, always baking, always there. Write that and you have written about a type, and the reader pictures their own grandmother rather than yours.

Start from the senses

Grandmothers live in sensory memory more than in anecdote, because most of the time you spent with them was ordinary.

• What did her house smell like when the door opened?
• What was always in the cupboard, or the handbag, or the tin?
• What was the television doing?
• What did she say the moment you arrived? Most grandmothers had one line, and it was the same for thirty years.
• What did she call you?

Five answers and you have a portrait. None of them contains the word kind, and all of them communicate it.

Let her be difficult

The best tributes admit the edges. She had opinions about your hair. She would not be argued with. She could be unkind about the neighbors and very funny about it.

A grandmother allowed to be a whole person is far more moving than a saint, because the reader believes her.

Three lengths

A card, two lines.

For Nan — who never once let me leave the house without eating something. Thank you for all of it.

A short paragraph, for a service sheet or a memorial page.

Joan made tea in a pot, kept the good biscuits behind the flour, and had an opinion about everyone on our street, most of them unrepeatable. She taught me to play cards for money at seven. She watched the racing with the sound down. She said "come here" instead of hello, for as long as I knew her, and I have never been so pleased to be summoned by anyone.

A spoken tribute, three minutes. Use the same method as any eulogy: two or three stories, one thing she gave you, a short ending. What changes is the register — a grandchild is allowed to be less composed and more affectionate than a son or daughter, and the room will expect it.

If you did not know her well

Distance is not a disqualification, and pretending otherwise produces the hollow version.

I only saw my grandmother twice a year, and I regret that now. What I remember is that she wrote to me — actual letters, in handwriting I could barely read, about the weather and her garden and what the cat had done. Twenty years of them. I kept every one, which I did not realize until this week.

Honest and small beats warm and general, every time.