Always a reader

is how I remember her.
We went to the funeral of the Senior Cat's cousin's wife yesterday. That may sound simply a rather distant relative to most people but the Senior Cat had known her for at least 85 years. I had known her all my life.I suspect that, for much of the world, she was simply a "nice" person. For us she was so much more.
She lost her father, a soldier, to WWII and didn't get the education she always wanted but she made up for it by reading. She read the classics - the Greek classics, she read other philosophy. She read science and theology, history and modern literature. She loved to discuss these things  and find yet more to read. And that is partly how I want to remember her - as, always a reader.
I knew her better than I might have known her because we often travelled together on the same train. If we did we would sit together and we would often, perhaps almost always, "talk books".  Yes, she was much older than I am - but younger than the Senior Cat.  It didn't make a lot of difference.  When I was at school F.... would say things like, "I think you should try this book"or "There's a book I've been reading I think would interest you." Like my last English teacher she nurtured my own love of reading. On hearing of her death  my brother sent me an email saying, "I came across a book she gave me yesterday." Yes, she gave books as presents. She gave carefully chosen books - books people wanted to read.
Our tastes weren't always the same but they coincided often enough that we could talk about  books we had enjoyed - and do it frequently.
I went off to study in London and we wrote to one another - about books.  That first time in London was a year of minimal reading for pleasure for me. I had to struggle with academic texts instead and a standard far higher than the one that had been expected of students at my teachers' college in Downunder. But F.... was there and telling me about books she had read.
When I came back after that first time away F... was there again telling me about this book and that book and some other book and a review here and a review there.  We went to some sessions at Writers' Week - so she could hear people I knew talk about not just books but the writing process and much more.  It fascinated her. She questioned it.
When she retired from her job as a secretary to a  university department she went to lectures in history, philosophy and logic instead. While she didn't get the degree she might have got had things been different she was invited to attend group tutorials and seminars because of her intense interest in the topics she was hearing about. The staff told her, "You have so much to offer the younger students." She spent hours helping them.
I went away again and then came back - twice. It wasn't my choice to come back and she understood that. She read the autobiography I wrote and told me, "Write the next chapter please...and write more Cat. " From her it was the ultimate compliment.
Her life was not an altogether happy one. She had lost her father in the war, when she was just thirteen, and then her mother and two sisters to cancer. Her mother-in-law treated her very  badly, seeing her as not being her son's social equal. Despite that she cared for that difficult old woman as if she had been her own mother. Then she lost her  husband - to cancer. Several years later she lost her daughter - again to cancer.  That hit hard and she never quite regained her equilibrium but her grandchildren helped.
Yesterday her surviving child mentioned her love of books and learning and many other things but he left it, rightly, to her grandchildren to try to tell people what "Grandma" was like. Did they succeed? Perhaps. In a way. I knew what they were saying about warmth and love and that special quality of "people-perception" that she had. She was one of those people who helped me through the rough adolescent years - and mine were rougher than most. Her youngest grandchild, now a young woman managed to retain her composure - just. Another didn't.
And then her former boss, the retired professor, got up to speak. He is a man who has seen much and travelled far. He has worked in PNG and Africa. He broke down at the end of what he had to say and managed, "I could not have had a better secretary." He and his wife had gone on visiting her regularly until she died.
I thought of all of this and, like too many other relationships, I felt she had given me far more than I had given her.
In the past two years she hasn't known me. It hasn't been possible to have a conversation with her. I resented that. She was still a friend though - and remained one. Yesterday I saw her again as she was for all of those years, wife, mother, grandmother, employee, cousin's wife, friend of the Senior Cat and, above all - a friend to me.