Sadie

I recently found this piece I wrote for a year 12 English assessment task in 2005. Sadie passed today, Wednesday the 18th of September 2024, at 100 years of age. An absolute legend who saw lots, spoke lots, loved lots.

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My Grandmother, 81 years young, attends mass every Saturday night and worships her God with complete devotion. Even though she had lost her husband after 53 years of love and happiness, she had a sense of acceptance.

‘Our Lord and Saviour’ shares the same birthday as my Grandmother, Sarah Therese Hanley, the 25th of December. It is quite coincidental that my Grandmother, my dad’s mum, affectionately known as Sadie, shares the same birth date as the being she worships with great loyalty.

For as long as I can remember, Sadie has been an entertainer. She thrills my cousins and me with her renditions of ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup’. Whenever I hear ‘Sadie, The Cleaning Lady’, I think of her. She may not have the same performing prowess as John Farnham, but she does an amazing job with her trusty scrubbing brush and pail of water.

I began to really get to know my Grandmother on the 20th of December 2002, the day that my Grandfather passed away. Somehow, I managed to find myself in a hospital room with my Grandmother, Mother, older Brother, two older sisters, three of my eight aunts, six of my twenty-eight cousins, and a Nun.

I am not religious, nor are my parents, sisters or brother. As I stood there in the hospital room with my family, the Nun began to recite the Lord’s Prayer. After each repetition of the prayer, my family, excluding my mother and siblings, would respond to the Nun. The woman, in habit, looked at us. She knew that I had no idea what was going on. She gave my siblings and me these disapproving looks. What are you doing here? God will strike you down with all his fury. Unlike most of my relatives, neither my siblings nor I had attended church, nor did we attend a primary or secondary school where the importance of Catholicism or any religion in everyday life was emphasised.

This began to fill my mind with questions. Why were we standing around my dead Grandfather reciting prayers? What significance did this carry? Did my family actually believe in the existence of a spiritual being?

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Pa Chick was my Grandfather, Sadie’s husband. He was given his nickname when he was younger after he was asked to feed his family’s chickens. Instead of placing the feed onto the ground, he decided to be ingenious and place the chickens in the feed bin and close the lid, leaving the chickens to suffocate. Chick would tell me that he loved Sadie more than anything else in the world and that they had never had a fight. I found this extremely hard to believe because every time I went to their house, they were having a tiff.

Pa Chick is remembered for the affectionate names he used to call Sadie. ‘The woman I share a mortgage with’, albeit quite misogynistic, is the one that pops into mind. Even though he would hate to admit it, Chick had been touched by Sadie’s faith. Above his head in the Holy Grail that was his shed still lives a piece of wood with the letters ‘OGGMSTKMBBMS’ carved into it. At one stage in my life, I believed it was a quote from a far-off African tribe, something about the love of family or courage and bravery. But no, it was an acronym for ‘Oh God Give Me Strength To Keep My Bloody Big Mouth Shut’. More often than not God failed to provide my Grandfather with this strength and he found himself spending some very cold and lonely night in the shed below that sign. Chick had been educated at the Sarah Therese School of Life.

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After we had buried our Grandfather, I needed to ask questions. Rather than go to Sadie, I talked to my parents about their faith. Dad was sent to an all boys’ Catholic boarding school at the age of ten. He never liked religion and still has no desire to believe in a higher spiritual being. Mum was raised with touches of the Anglican church, but she absolutely wasn’t, and she never went to church. She not a fan of organised religion.

I began with a dictionary. Religion, noun. Belief in the existence of a superhuman controlling power, especially of God or gods, usually expressed in worship. Books in this very school library taught me that there are thousands of gods, but mainly that God is one, God created the heavens and earth, God is perfect, and God is eternal. This God bloke or sheila sounds mighty fine, doesn’t he or she or they?

Can the existence of any God be verified or proved? There are two types of proof, experience, and process of reasoning or rational demonstration. I can prove to you that there are twenty cows in a paddock by taking you into that paddock with me and counting them. Unfortunately, the gods that I had read about could not, sadly, be counted in a field. They would have to be proved through a process of reasoning. Good luck!

I talked with Sadie about religion, asking her small questions, slowly leading up to the big one, ‘why do you believe in God?’ At this point, Sadie began to use the English language in a very odd way. She claimed that ‘God is an eternal, infinite spirit’, while on the other hand, she apparently had no particular problem when she described God as walking into the Garden of Eden, chatting with human beings, eating fruits, having a son, even repenting and laughing. I thought to myself, ‘can an eternal spirit walk, talk, repent and laugh? Not to mention father a child?’

I had asked Sadie, and she tried to explain through process of reasoning, but I could not understand why she had to believe in this other spirit. But at this moment, I realised that by asking my Grandmother these questions, I had learnt to love and respect her more than I already did. I am now making the most of our time together by studying her. I hope that my zest for life will or might be the same when or if I reach 84 years of age.

My Grandmother, 81 years young, still attends mass every Saturday night, and worships her God with complete devotion. Even after she had lost her husband of 53 years of love and happiness, she had a sense of acceptance. Sadie tells me that “he is in a better place now” and that “it was meant to be”. On the 20th of December 2002, my Grandmother shocked me. Her composure. Her conviction. Her complete certainty that my Grandfather would be happy wherever he was. I now know that my Grandmother’s journey through life will be comfortable and safe, and that she will pray for my life to be safe as well.