The warmth of the heart

We were in Tbilisi over Easter, the main festival in Georgia.  Like Christmas at home, it's a time for visiting, feasting, opening the home to friends and relatives.  It struck me that in every home we visited, there was an elderly mother, living with her children and grandchildren.  Sometimes she was helping, bringing dishes and glasses to the table, sometimes she was barely seen, slipping from bedroom to kitchen or bathroom, then disappearing like a shadow back into her own room. 

We heard many conflicting stories about this living arrangement.  Sometimes the mother, or more commonly the mother-in-law, was a nuisance, vetoing home improvements or complaining about the absence abroad of a son or daughter.  Usually she was a much-loved and natural baby-sitting, looking after her grandchildren so that daughters and daughter-in-laws could work.  When people talked about these women, there was a mix of love and exasperation but never a question of changing the status quo.

When I came home, I read, after hearing some of it on R4's Book of the Week, Marie de Hennezel's The Warmth of the Heart Stops the Body from Rusting - a polemic about aging and how it is dreaded in our culture.  Without wanting to romanticise the Georgian approach, it seems to me that living with the extended family, joining in the singing at an Easter feast, then slipping away into one's own room when one wants, wouldn't be an unpleasant way of getting old.

The writing on the wall

This is a snapshot of part of the memorial 'For United Georgia: Monument to the Heroes who Fell Fighting for the Territorial Integrity of Georgia", ერთიანი საქართველოსთვის: საქართველოს ერთიანობისთვის ბრძოლაში დაღუპულ გმირთა მემორიალი, ertiani sakartvelostvis: sakartvelos ertianobistvis brdzolashi daghup'ul gmirta memoriali - otherwise known as the Abkhazia War Memorial.

The carved letters spell out the names of the thousands of soldiers who lost their lives.  I can't read them, but the cumulative effect of seeing them in their long lists down the marble walls, is moving and deeply sad.  I hear that today's Times has printed lists of names of all those killed through the actions of Osama bin Laden who died yesterday.  Billy Collins' poem about 9/11 similarly lists, alphabetically, the first names of some of the victims of the attack.  This imposition of order, alphabetical, regularly rendered letters, contained on a memorial or the pages of a newspaper or in a poem, help me to feel safe whilst at the same time confronting the reality of losses on a massive scale.  Nata finds the name of her friend.  I've never met him and so it means nothing and yet, the locating of someone specific in the lists, makes sense of all of those individual clusters of letters.

I'm reminded of Anna Akhamatova, 'I should like to call you all by name, / but they have lost the lists'.  I would like to call you all by name but still, in this place of sorrows, I'm unable to read.