HEARTFELT

As a child I always beat Granma at our games of cards. “Snap!” I would shout triumphantly. No one else would play with me. Granma would bring me juice and biscuits.

“Well done,” she’d say. “You’re The Champion!”

“I’m better than you Granma!”

“Of course you’re better than me,” she’d say, smiling as I greedily snatched up the dog-eared cards and dealt them out yet again.

After Grandad finally had to move to the hospice, dying only a few days later, Granma had no one to look after anymore.

She moved back to the countryside she’d always felt kinship with, where within three months she’d created and was single-handedly running her own donkey sanctuary.

It wasn’t just animals she loved. All her life she’d given pieces of her heart to other people, from complete strangers she knew she’d never see again; to a family member shunned by the rest of them, even my parents, for behaviour they considered intolerable, until by the time she died – and I know this as fact because of my experiment – the type my family were disgusted by – Granma’s heart weighed nothing at all.