The Weight of a Woman's Life

My Grandmothers' Story: Unwritten. Unfinished. Unforgotten.

The weight of my grandmother Elsie’s life has been reduced to a handful of sticky notes. Pink, blue, yellow—thirty paper slips stacked haphazardly in a clay bowl beside my writer’s desk.

Each slip bears my handwriting, each a year, a moment, a turning point in her life.

1907: Elsie is born.
1931: Elsie marries Don.
1932: Elsie has her first child.
1938: Elsie and Don walk off the land, penniless.

And then there’s this one.

1950: Elsie is committed to the Parkside Lunatic Asylum.

It’s September 2024 and for five months now, these fragile fragments of her life have sat gathering dust. A well-struck match would turn them to ash in an instant.

This desk—my so-called writer’s desk—doesn’t feel like a place of creation today. It feels like the desk of a fraud. A wannabe. A woman with the will but not the words. I know that to be a writer, I must write. It doesn’t matter why, what, or how much—only that I do.

And yet, I sit. Unable to tap, tap, tap away.

Above my desk, a blank whiteboard looms, snow-white and sterile. A stark reminder that her story is still waiting for me.

Pinned to it are two photos of my grandmother. Two women, sixty years apart, the same soul.

The first, black and white. Elsie at twenty, standing upright and apart from her mother and two other unidentified women. Two little girls at her feet. She looks down at them, her expression unreadable—bemusement, tolerance, something else. She wears a well-tailored, modest dress, ankle-length. Her hands clasped, concealing a handkerchief. Dark hair styled with kiss-curls frame her face. She looks refined. Regal, even. A farm girl trying to fit into a world she is yet to discover.

The second, in colour. Elsie at eighty, frozen in the moment after blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. A soft, distant smile. Her silver hair carefully roller-set, her white pearl earrings matching the soft pink, white-spotted chiffon dress. I remember the feel of that dress, and her smell. The overpowering perfume mingled with the musty scent of mothballs.

A lifetime of hidden stories between those two photos.

Before the whiteboard, there had been flip-chart paper covering the wall, sticky notes scattered across it. I had mapped out a four-part historical novel—my way of giving Elsie a voice. I had planned to transfer my flimsy paper plan to the whiteboard, something more permanent. A commitment. An act of devotion.

Instead, the whiteboard became another distraction. Another way to delay the work. A grand exercise in avoidance. And with it came the questions.

Would filling in the gaps with fiction do my grandmother justice?
If I give her a voice, will it be the right one?
Will my family accept this version of her story?
Do I have the skill to tell it?

Doubt. The ever-present shadow of every writer’s life.

Over two years, our family had uncovered more about Elsie than we’d ever thought possible. We traced her steps across South Australia—from the Yorke Peninsula to Adelaide, to the Murray Mallee region. We combed through 300 pages of medical files, unearthed forgotten news stories, pieced together family trees. We walked the grounds of the asylum, stood on the land where she was born, where she lived, where she was buried.

So much research. So many facts. So many ways to busy myself with everything but the writing.

But facts only take me so far.

There is so much we will never know, yet must imagine.

And so I wonder: What now?

The whiteboard remains blank. The sticky notes sit idle. I have no clue what to do with these fragile fragments of history. These stories in waiting.

Perhaps I’ll just write.

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Author’s Note:
I wrote this blog in 2024 when I was drowning in self-doubt about this project. Happy to say I took my own advice—I kept writing. I’m now at 35,000 words.