Fhaolan was expecting the call, but expectations are not always enough of a shield.
Even afterwards, the shock takes a long time to wear off.
The wolfen just sits in the alleyway and cries.
***
A young girl, seamstress by trade, smiles as she is courted by the shipbuilder's apprentice. The parents all approve, the young lovers being equally practical as well as headstrong. They suffer some teasing, as although they are both of Scottish blood, he is small and dark like a Pict, while she is tall and fair like a Viking. They shrug off the insults, for they will prove all the nay-sayers wrong with time.
***
A young woman, only a short time married, weeps for her first child, who lived but a moment. Others will follow, but only a few will live long enough to run and play. The doctors have no time for the poor.
***
A woman rejoices as her husband is promoted to foreman of the shipyard, only to turn to shock as she learns of the new project he is to head. A submarine, the first of it's kind built in England.
A nuclear submarine.
***
Tears flow as a mother has her living children leave home, her two sons and two daughters off to a foreign country, to find work when there is none here. One son as a nurse, the other three as teachers. All find their English diplomas and degrees, funded by grants and their parents insanely hard work, to be useless in the new land. The nurse begins working for charities, who care little for the rules, supporting the teachers as they go back to school.
Eventually, they gather together enough money to bring the rest of their family across the ocean.
***
A matriarch laughs at the antics of her grandchildren, and helps her sickly husband to sit at the table. His work with the furnaces has tainted his life, filling his lungs with flux that will never go away. They stay now with the oldest son, the art teacher who never married.
Not long after, her eldest daughter is taken by cancer. The man that had married her, and their children, all disgrace themselves one after another. The man proves to be a drunkard who had abused his wife, their son is dishonorably discharged from the army, and the daughter runs away, leaving her own husband and two children. Exercising her right as matriarch, she declares that branch to be disowned, except for the children who are adopted by the clan to be brought up properly.
***
An elderly woman cries as the flux finally takes her husband, at the age of eighty-one. Even to the end, his strength is evident as it takes five strokes and a heart attack over a span of three days for him to give into death.
***
Now ninety-six herself, so tantalizingly close to being a centurion, her grandchildren are now successful in their own lives, some giving her the gift of great-grandchildren, she lies in bed at Christmas as the family gathers in the house.
Sickness and sheer age has weakened her, but she refuses to give in just like her husband. For this last Christmas, she gathers her strength, rises from the bed, and walks out to the living room to greet the family. Most of them take after her in height, and after her dead husband in colouring, and all marvel at how well she seems after her long sickness.
***
Not quite a month later, Fhaolan looks up to the sky, tears still free-flowing, "Goodbye Grandma. I'll miss ye."
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