MY WIDOWED GRANDMOTHER lived with us when I was a small boy; she died when I was eight years old. Some of the most vivid memories are of Sunday evenings and the great ritual of her dressing up to go to chapel – black hat and a rather moth-eaten fur stole – which kept alive a world that, even in the 1950s, was already fading fast, the world of intense Welsh chapel devotion, strict but very deep. She symbolised all the mysterious environment of ‘Ystrad’, the little town (more fully, Ystradgynlais) in the Swansea valley where the family had lived before we moved to Cardiff for a while, and where we visited every few weeks: she was central in my awareness of a culture that was both strange and also profoundly my own. Like many grandparents in the mid-twentieth century she was the bridge between a world that had hardly changed for a couple of hundred years and the fast-moving post-war period. Living history.
But the memories that were most significant, I think, were of her last couple of years. It is always hard and frightening to watch someone you love dying at close quarters, especially when you’re too young to understand much of what’s happening. But what stayed with me was a sense of her dignity and courage. What I owe her is my first exposure to the facts of death and the possibility of facing it calmly, hopefully and without fuss – with that deep and mysterious world of devotion silently holding her through it.
Rowan Williams was born and grew up in Wales. He is a theologian, writer and poet. He was elected Archbishop of Canterbury on 23 July 2002.