A portrait of my grandmother as a young woman

Last year my great-grandmother moved from the small house in Scarborough where she had spent a good part of her adult life, into a new home close to my grandfather just north of the city. Over the course of packing my mother came across boxes and boxes of photographs, many of which were undated and unmarked, and none of which were in any sort of order. An entire lifetime of memories had been relegated to dusty shoe boxes and for the most part forgotten.

My mother, in one of her many benevolent gestures, decided to take up the daunting task of going through the seemingly infinite snapshots, identifying people and places, putting them in chronological order and then in photo albums. It was a project borne out of her love for her grandmother, a gift to grandma and to everyone who would come after her.

Over the Christmas holidays our dining room table became a towering scrapbook factory littered with pictures, photo album pages, post-it notes full of names, dates and question marks and a much-needed magnifying glass. We sat down with my great-grandmother and began the process of piecing together dozens of obscure lives.

My great-grandmother’s past pay spread out on the table before her, and I watched as she shuffled through it, holding her life in her delicate hands and watching it replay before her eyes. Every so often she would slap down a picture and exclaim, “OHH yes!! I remember this!” and she would reveal an anecdote, a moment caught in time, an event, sometimes large, sometimes small, but always important to her. Often these snippets were uttered more to herself than to those around her, but eventually the stories began to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and her exquisite life, and the exquisite lives of her family, started to take form.

In a way, putting all these photos in order gave depth to my own past. My history came alive at that table. People seemed to come to life and ride right off the glossy dog-eared snapshots and into our dining room. I was flooded with faces, dates and stories, triumphs and tragedies, loves and losses. Names danced across my brain: Bertha, Paul, Selena, Alph, Olive.

I was amazed how quickly I began to recognize faces, how the scattered names started to come together in my head as I began to connect people and see how they all related. These strangers became three-dimensional, and the more time I spent with them the more I saw their personalities. My mother and I were blowing the dust off their faces and as we did we found that their silence was full of voices, the black and white pictures full of colour.

What lay across the table were echoes from, what was for us, a time past, but a time still very much alive in my great-grandmother’s heart, made clear from the way her eyes lit up at snapshots of Christmas dinners, sparkling cottage lakes, men on docks proudly displaying recently-caught fish, children on swings, women in straw hats in gardens, men, no older than my younger brothers, standing in military uniform in backyards, and impeccably dressed women with cocktails, their heads thrown back in laughter (just like I laugh).

I now know that Grandpa George had the kindest face and warmest smile. I know that his wife, Winnifred, my great-great-grandmother, remained beautiful until the day she died. I saw my brother Michael’s face in that of Uncle Donald, whom my great-grandmother, even years after his passing, still referred to as “my beloved brother.”

I feel like I’d developed a relationship with family that had been lost to me, people who were at one time ghosts from somebody else’s past. Life has been breathed into them and they are now vibrant and familiar. They have been resurrected from those dusty shoe boxes and from the very pages on which their images have been immortalized. I have found a new connection to these amazing lives from which my own eventually sprang. Their laughter makes me smile, their losses fill my heart with sadness, and through my great-grandmother’s reminiscences they have become real.

Through knowing them better I feel I got to know my great-grandmother better, a woman who, up until December, had merely been a laughing, merry face that came through the front door with a whirlwind of snow and cold air every Christmas and left that same evening after a dessert of rum and egg nog and Trivial Pursuit.

The reward of this new intimacy helped balance the sense of loss I felt when she passed away a few months later.

She might be gone now, but before her final parting I was finally granted the honour of truly knowing Phyllis Schwendau. She was my lovely, smart, funny great-grandmother. She was Edna and Winnifred and George, Norma and Vernon and Donald. She was the echo of their laughter. She was my grandpa and my mother and my brothers. She was me. And I am all of them.

And thanks to the love, patience and dedication of my own mother, these people, who would have been lost with my great-grandma's passing, have been re-born, and will now live on.