Skating By: On Rollerskates, Body, and Loss

Mairi Redman | February 23rd, 2021

For my twenty-fourth birthday last week I was gifted a pair of rollerskates. Pastel blue with lilac laces (or “bubblegum”, apparently.) By this point I'd spent months watching friends on their skater Instagrams*, admiring their decisive agility and poise. 

I'd assumed that I’d take to it quite quickly, having somehow absorbed their expertise. Unsurprisingly, though, it has been a little less straightforward so far. I’m a naturally clumsy person and so it follows that I’d be just a little unsteady on wheels, however enthusiastic I may be.

But it's fun, which is a word I rarely associate with exercise. I'm decisively sports-adverse, preferring middle-aged activities such as long country walks to anything requiring much coordination. Prone to week-long fads, I'm also painfully aware that this may join the list of neglected passions. Did I ever actually finish a course of yoga, or commit to my once-a-week swim?

Yet I return from skating breathy, with smiles in my eyes, and delight at the small progress that I've made. My heart beats from both exertion and adrenaline, a giddy combination. So far, I look forward eagerly to skating every day. It's rewarding and silly and simply squeals of childlike glee.

It's a funny bit of timing that as I'm finally coming into my body my Gran will soon be leaving hers.

Dorothy's kind, everyone says, and makes them giggle with her comments. Her wit is dry but applied carefully, using the element of surprise. She’s gentle, in an unassuming sort of way. As cliché as it sounds, I've never met anyone that doesn't like her. Even as she's lost her memory over the years she's held onto her shining core, the dancing heart of her that beams through every smile.

It's that smile that I picture vividly when I think of her, that or her trademark northern chuckle. I can see her wheeled into our dining room for Sunday dinner, sprinkling greetings as she goes, content as she basks in the family glow. We fidget and fight, bickering needlessly over this and that but she doesn't mind at all. She's home with us; we are her home.

It has now been over a year since she was last at Sunday dinner, the pandemic having created distance that's unsafe to defy. Following the long-term move into a care home, her life has been coloured by an impressive smorgasbord of ventures, from flower arranging to VR exploration, visits from miniature donkeys to making pumpkins out of socks. She's been happier than when she sat languid in her bungalow, yet she's never been so far away.

And now it seems, guttingly, that frailty is winning against her dogged strength. Old age has caught up and it's cashing in with cold vengeance. Initially hospitalised with a suspected infection, Dorothy's now been transferred back to the care home, the hospital having been unable to nurse her back to health. My darling Gran, once splutteringly hardy, is now receiving end-of-life care.

But I got to visit her - with no barriers - for the first time in a year. Clad in a profuse amount of PPE, I was taken to her room in the care home, ushered into the space where she'd lived since moving in. She lay there, still, sleeping the daylight hours away. I knelt down, held her hand through the gloves and I wished with all my might that I'd see that smile again. Sobbing through my mask, I was relieved that my face was partially concealed. Yet I wished that I could touch her, bare skin onto skin.

Often as I think of her now, lying sleeping in her bed, I curl up, close my eyes and find myself mirroring her, feeling connected by this synchronous positioning. I twist her ring around my finger like a beckoning call home. What she dreams of is unknown, but I long to tap into this frequency, desperate for her to feel like she is not alone.

A couple of weeks prior, we were sorting through her photos, attempting to bring order to memories predating our own. Starting from her birth in the thirties, the images swam around us as we huddled together to breathe them in. One photo in particular caught my eye, almost alarmingly - dated 1953, it was me under a sepia gaze. I was shocked. I’d always assumed I looked more like my mother’s family, yet Gran and I had shared a face. Placed on my bookshelf, it served to comfort me greatly, even before she started to be taken ill. 

Dorothy Laura Redman (née Cook) aged twenty-one, 21st April 1953

Now I take solace in this closeness, in the current that runs through us both. I can't bear to start thinking of her in the past tense, nor accept the finality of it all. But, like skating, she has helped me find a home in my body. Blood and bone connect us more than I had ever known.

For more pieces like this, please check out Mairi’s blog.