When I wrote about my grandmother passing away, a lot of people referred to the fact that I had written so much about her before that they felt like they knew her too. It was an amazing feeling to know that she was someone who wouldn’t even have known on a computer, and yet so many people knew who she was through what I wrote here. Every so often I would like to tell some stories about my family members to help make sure that they live on.

Tonight while waiting for “Criminal Minds” to come on, I watched a bit of a show called “Men of the Deep” which was about a men’s choir made up of coal miners. They sang songs about various tragedies that have happened in mines over the course of history and they also showed some interviews with wives and mothers of people who had been lost in the mines.

When my grandmother was very young, she hopped on a bus and a train and headed to Val d’Or, which is north and West of Montreal. My grandfather had already gone out there and was working in the gold mines. They got married and lived in a one-room tiny home in the mining village. When my uncle was born, they had little heat so she had him sleep in a hat and layers and lots of blankets to swaddle him; they had no room (or money) for a crib, so he slept in a drawer from their dresser on the floor. My grandmother often talked about how the toilet seat in the outhouse would freeze solid in the winter so she cut a donut-shaped piece of fur to carry out with her to sit on when she would need to pee at night. It was a way of life I can’t even imagine.

And I can’t imagine living with the constant fear every time your husband or son or father or brother walked to work and got on that old elevator that sank so far into the ground. One of the most chilling stories I ever remember hearing was one where my grandmother was sound asleep in bed. Whenever anything bad happened, some sort of accident or explosion, they would turn on a siren that rang over the entire population so that everyone would know something had gone wrong and there were likely casualties. My grandmother was sleeping and the siren started blasting in the middle of the night. She got up and ran out her front door in her nightgown, racing towards the mine and fearing the worst. She was halfway there when she realized that my grandfather had been asleep beside her when she tore out the front door. He wasn’t even working that night but the sheer terror of something happening to your loved ones was so deep inside that it was an automatic flinching reaction.

She must have been so relieved when they packed up and came back to Montreal and my grandfather started working for Canadian Pacific, the train company. It was a whole lot safer and saner.

There are a whole lifetime of memories crammed into my head right now. I’m sure I’ll share some more soon.