A beer with Grandma - Mary Parker (1928-2021) at Formerly The Blackball Hilton. Photo/Kim Knight
Mary Parker was a cake decorator and a grandma. Kim Knight on her last conversation with the matriarch she learned to love more later in life.
The fruit on the japonica tree is parakeet green.
"What is that?" I ask Grandma. And she explains that, soon, these waxen apple-like globes will turn yellow and then you can pick them and make a jelly. There is a jar, perhaps, in the pantry.
The day before, I sit on her living room floor cracking open the windfall walnuts stored in the shed. "Have you ever had pickled walnuts?" she asks. In summer, you take the unripe walnut and pierce its casing with a darning needle. You soak it in brine and it turns coal-black. Then you bottle it, in a brown sugar and malt vinegar mix. There is a jar, perhaps, in the pantry. "It's probably 30 years old," says Grandma.
If you know how, you can make things last for ages.
Grandma is 92 and we are waiting for her to die. I have packed long sleeves for the trip to Blenheim, but the nor'wester is hot and everywhere I go, I sweat. Cool solace in her living room with the through-breeze that catches the wind chimes on the porch. Grandma's house sounds like a temple, unless it is on the hour, when it sounds like the radio news and whichever native bird is timed to squawk or trill from the kitschy clock above the door frame.
I last saw Grandma at Christmas. She self-diagnosed her stomach pains, suspecting Molenberg had started to put linseed in its bread. I remember her telling me that when she went into labour with her eldest child, she assumed it was the gripes from eating parsnip.
They find the tumour in January. Her age, her pacemaker, her failing kidneys do not make her a candidate for surgery or standard cancer treatments. I ask Grandma if she is afraid.
"I'm scared of pain," Grandma says. "I'm not scared of dying. It's silly to be 92 and scared of dying. It's what comes between now and then."
It annoys me, how stoic she is. I think she will live until she is 100 or 150 or forever. She was born in 1928. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was just 17 and her husband died 30 years ago but she has been here my whole life so far.
I am becoming hungrier for her stories.
She used to wear her hair in plaits. One day, while she was visiting her Aunty Doni in Wellington, she came to breakfast with it loose around her shoulders. The English lodger who had planned to go to the Speedway that night immediately cancelled his plans. They went to a dance. They walked on the beach at Scorching Bay.
"It was dead calm and there was phosphorescence and we wrote our names in the sand and it all sparkled. Now, can you imagine anything more romantic?"
Three weeks later, in Christchurch, running to a bus stop in the pouring rain, Grandma and Grandpa get engaged. Their wedding reception is at Warner's Hotel and there is icecream for dessert. Life is just an endless series of loops. My grandmother and I kissed boys in the same pub, six decades apart.
When New Zealand's borders close and Covid looms, my wedding goes on hold. Grandma has already made the cakes and now she is making sugar daisies and ginkgo leaves. She emails: "A very sensible decision. The two fruit cakes will improve on keeping." She tells me these are the last cakes she will make but I am convinced it will be years before her house stops smelling like marzipan.
My grandma is a famous cake decorator. Mary Ethel Parker has travelled to Canada, America and Australia to demonstrate her technique. She is a life member of the New Zealand Cake Decorators Guild. Her icing flowers are so realistic that, sometimes, brides complain because they think she has just picked them from the garden. She wins her first medal in the 1980s. Hundreds of weddings, birthdays, christenings and anniversaries are marked by the cutting of her cakes. The year that Grandpa died, and every year after that, she made a cake for the Cancer Society raffle. Volunteers sit outside the supermarket and her sugar daffodils, jonquils and narcissus are converted to cold hard cash; she raises thousands of dollars in the fight against the disease that is killing her.
We are waiting for Grandma to die and the road from Woodbourne airport to her living room is well travelled. She has four children, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. I make it to Blenheim just six hours before Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announces Auckland's fourth lockdown. I worried last year, about Grandma sitting behind her ranch slider doors, waiting for my mum to arrive with her groceries. She emailed and told me she was eating plenty of parsley and that if she "got the bot", her demise might help with the housing shortage.
She says: "Listen Kim, I've had a good life." I ask if she is astonished at all she has lived through and she replies, "When I was growing up, we didn't even know the continents had drifted apart." I think she is joking. The year my dad lost a kidney to cancer, she iced a rasher of bacon and put it on his birthday cake.
Growing up, I don't really like my grandma. She doesn't think farts are funny and she makes me eat chicken legs with a knife and fork. There are too many dishes to wash after she cooks and she is strict. My mum is pregnant at 17 and I am the first grandchild but in my teens it is like I have two sets of parents. Other kids have grandmas with white hair and a lolly jar. Mine smokes cigarettes and corrects my grammar.
I'm 35 before I come to understand she is more like me than anyone else in my family. Her husband is gone and I have left a 13-year relationship. We are both living on our own; we both know how to change a fuse, get rid of a spider and cook dinner for one. This is when our phone calls really begin.
It is so easy now to talk to her in that cool room where the breeze hits the windchimes and the clock chimes kōkako-o-clock. I tell her how much I love her. How important she is. How, when I feared I had made a terrible mistake, she helped me believe I could do this thing of Becoming Me.
Earlier, she had listened to the radio news. We have a conversation about how much te reo there is these days and she tells me crossly she is too old to learn now. For once, I do not bite back. She is dying. She probably doesn't have time. But then she surprises me. She thinks the Māori language expresses some ideas so much better than English does - like the words for "be strong".
Grandma says she's been thinking about how much she wanted to say that in the letters she is writing this week and we talk about how that would be okay; how that if she thinks they are the right words, then it is right for her to use them.
The conversation moves on. I pick some lemons from her tree, pack away the bay leaves my aunt has collected for me. Dad arrives to take me to the airport. Grandma hugs me really hard. She says, "Kia kaha."
I've never heard her say that before. On the plane, I'm crying and laughing, because I know she knows I'll want to write this down and that she has written her own perfect ending.
Four days later, Grandma is admitted to hospital. Four days after that, she dies. She has selected her own urn (blue, with flowers and butterflies) and her own funeral reading (I Love all Beauteous Things). The extended family gathers for takeaways a couple of nights before the service. I place the order for sweet and sour pork, chicken with cashew nuts and shrimp fried rice. Dad picks up the food but, when I open the containers, there is no rice. The restaurant has made a mistake and swapped it for egg foo young. I've never ordered this dish in my life and I definitely didn't order it just now. My aunt tells me it is Grandma's favourite.
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