Iain's Eulogy

My Granny, Ina Prentice (neé Pert), was born in 1920 in the small town of Montrose in the north of Scotland and died last Tuesday. She lived through nine decades, and I have roughly five minutes to talk about her life. So rather than bombard you with biographical details or standard-issue meditations on love and loss, I would like to recount her life as she would: with a few anecdotes. Consider them as slides held up to the light, in which her spirit can perhaps be glimpsed.

Anyone who knew Granny can attest to her stoic determination—she braved debilitating arthritic pain for as long as I've been alive. But let's bypass her neck and knees for the moment, and harken back to the onset of World War II, when the British authorities sent out an alert that Montrose would be a potential target of Nazi bombing due to the Aerodrome (an RAF training ground) built nearby. Upon hearing this announcement, Granny grabbed a shovel, rushed outside, and started digging a bomb shelter in the backyard. The rest of her family scoffed at this project and refused to help, and the marshy seaside ground pooled water almost as quickly as she could dig. Undeterred, she continued digging until after dark because, as she said, "somebody had to do it, and if they were all going to stand there and laugh, I thought I'd better do it myself."

This hardnosed determination served her well for the duration of the war, as she served her country as a telegrapher, transmitting and receiving Morse code for stints of up to 24 consecutive hours. She liked to joke that her prolific typing skills earned her the title of "fasted girl in the company."

She had a keen sense of fun in addition to her hard work and determination. A more playful wartime memory that she once recalled to me was of going to a dance with her boyfriend from the Canadian Air Force. As they walked home in the fog, with some song and dance lingering in them, they would swing arm-in-arm around every third lamppost. She knew neither the rhyme nor reason for this; perhaps it had to do with happiness at being alive. He was killed in action a few weeks later, but she quietly carried that vivacity onward into her old age.

A happier love story, and further evidence of Granny's indomitable spirit: near the end of the war, she was out for a walk with a friend in the country and bumped into a handsome young man on a bicycle. "That's the man I'm going to marry," she thought to herself. And she was right—the handsome bicyclist, a gifted musician named Evan Ridley Prentice, married her in 1946 and they settled in Bristol, England.

Let us take the image of the bicycle and shift from the distant past to more recent memories from my lifetime. One summer, our family was about to leave on a camping trip when car troubles struck. Granny instantly suggested that we take her car instead. "But how will you get around?" Mum asked. "Oh, I can ride a bicycle," she said. This from an 80 year old with two artificial knees, who probably hadn't ridden a bike since the 1960s. And she was thoroughly offended at any doubts as to the practicality of this arrangement. "I can manage," she hotly insisted.

We were blessed to have Granny move to the USA in 1990, to be near us kids as we grew up. All her interactions with us—bicycle-related or otherwise—were marked by unfailing generosity and sacrificial love. She learned the rules of baseball so she could watch it with me; she sewed wonderfully intricate Irish dancing dresses for the girls; she managed to throw games of Scrabble to let us win, in spite of her being skilled enough to go to the Irish National Championships the year we lived there. She showed her love particularly in feeding and taking care of us, which meant that not being hungry wasn't an option—she would dig through her supplies until she found something to give you. Tea and cookies? No? Well how about an omelet? There's some juice in the fridge... and those sausages... shall we cook up these sausages? Would you like a bowl of ice cream? I could make some soup. Have a bit of whisky—go on...

Because of this giving instinct, she found her augmenting physical limitations to be particularly frustrating. She still did everything she could—the morning I was flying back to school in January, I was awakened by her slowly bustling around the kitchen in the pre-dawn darkness. She had gotten my flight time mixed up, and had gotten up at 5am to make egg sandwiches for me to take on my trip. In the past month, when she was finally no longer able to move about on her own and do things for others, she seemed to set herself to the task of dying with the same determination and sensibility with which she lived her life.

Speaking for my brothers and sisters, we were unusually blessed to be able to spend so much time with Granny in our lives as we grew up. She is present in our memories, our traditions, our recipes, our vocabularies, and our understanding of what love looks like.

One of Granny's earliest memories was of going nightswimming in the North Sea off the golf course in Montrose with her father when she was a little girl. He would swim out under the moon and keep her afloat in his arms. After today's ceremony, and in accordance with her wishes, her remains will be sent to Scotland and be interred there, where she painted and golfed and swam and dug bomb shelters, and thus the final "slide" of her life that we see before us today will fittingly mirror her first.