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Keywords: Grandmoth

  • RELIGION

    Nancy Pelosi and the problem of the pro-choice Catholic politician

    • Bill Uren
    • 08 December 2022
    20 Comments

    Nancy Pelosi recently announced her retirement as leader of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, proclaiming that she was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a devout Catholic. Yet citing her support for pro-choice on abortion, the archbishop of her home archdiocese of San Francisco has forbidden her access to Holy Communion. So, the question remains: what sort of moral reasoning could Mrs Pelosi invoke to support her pro-choice stance?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Are we respecting our elders?

    • Cristy Clark
    • 26 November 2020
    5 Comments

    This past weekend, I visited my grandparents in their residential aged care home. As usual, it was both lovely and utterly heartbreaking. Lovely, because I feel so lucky to be able to spend time with them, that they are still alive, their home is accepting visitors, and they still remember who I am. But, also, heartbreaking, because aging is tough, and living in residential aged care is tougher still, and this year, well, this year has made it all so much harder.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Putting a value on a human life

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 October 2020
    7 Comments

    The response to COVID has invited reflection about the relative value of one human death (and so of one human life) as compared with another. This is a radical question because it makes us ask whether the value of a human life is defined by economic wellbeing and by potential contribution to the economy, or by deeper qualities.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    National (Virtual) Grandparent's Day

    • Seetha Nambiar Dodd
    • 24 September 2020
    5 Comments

    My mother informs me, over the telephone, that she has just returned from a trial run of her inaugural ‘live-cam’ tour at the local Hindu temple in Kuala Lumpur. My niece, who lives in England, is learning about Hinduism in her Religious Education class and would love to show her classmates a live, on-site presentation of her grandmother’s temple.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Old or young: we all have equal value

    • Daniel Fleming
    • 14 May 2020
    7 Comments

    I’ve been left wondering at the amount of oxygen being given to a particular branch of ‘pandemic analysis’, one that sees cost-benefit analysis taking centre stage, with all the disturbing suggestions that follow.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What you notice when you’re not really there

    • Neve Mahoney
    • 04 July 2019
    8 Comments

    I've waitressed at yacht clubs, fire stations, homes. I've seen 16 year olds on their birthdays, old couples on their anniversaries, a surprise wedding. I've watched grandmothers ferrying food to their grandkids, and heard the cadences in people's speech all over Victoria. I learned a lot about people when I wasn't 'really' there.

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  • RELIGION

    Finding my religion in Indonesia

    • Erin Cook
    • 04 May 2018
    9 Comments

    The church has always been more about family than religion to me - my grandmother's grandmother did it all in Latin, but isn't it cool that we went through the same motions? - and I thought it always would. Then I got lucky: I moved to the world's most populous Muslim country.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The gift of the shell and the empty box

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 27 October 2017
    2 Comments

    Brenda Niall's biographies characteristically begin with simple and enigmatic stories, whose significance becomes clearer as the book develops. This exploration of her grandmother's life takes its point of departure in two of her possessions. The first is a wooden box made for Aggie Maguire by her brother as they sailed to Australia.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What I did in my holidays

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 17 January 2017
    7 Comments

    It seems incredible that there were ten of those summers, consecutive ones when three generations coexisted happily. My siblings and I had an idyllic Ocean Road beach practically all to ourselves, the men went fishing every afternoon, except when, to Grandfather's annoyance, an easterly was blowing, and the women, in time-honoured fashion, kept everybody fed. Of course change was inevitable, although I didn't really believe it, and started with my grandmother's death. I was 19.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Children are the yardsticks of our mortality

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 11 November 2016
    5 Comments

    One minute you're escorting your five-year-old daughter to the school gate, the next you're popping a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and wondering where the last 17 years went. My grandmother told me children age you. I thought she meant they wore you down, put grey hairs on your head. But I understood after I'd become a parent myself. Children are hour glasses that cannot be laid on their sides for even a moment, but must be turned over as soon as the last grain of sand has fallen through the flue.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My 102 year old grandmother

    • Isabella Fels, Peter Gebhardt
    • 16 August 2016
    3 Comments

    Is she 2 or 102? She can be either. My grandmother sometimes she looks at me in silence with wide naïve eyes. Other times pearls of wisdom seep from her heart: 'Forgive and forget my sweetheart Isabella. Chocolate is your enemy. A good salad is your friend my precious Isabella. Don't do unto others what you don't want done to you my cherished Isabella.' I hold her warm hand. She understands me. She completes me, now that my mother her daughter has left us behind.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    The boat people from paradise lost

    • Lyn Bender
    • 23 April 2016
    7 Comments

    Ursula Rakova told how the sea that had been the friend of her people, was turning against them. It had crashed through and divided her island in two. Coconut palms were collapsing at the new shoreline. Food gardens were lost, as the soil was increasingly rendered infertile by salty tides that washed over them. The land that had been handed from grandmother to daughter, would bequeath no legacy to the granddaughters. The homeland of generations was disappearing before their eyes.

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