45 Get Well Soon Messages for Grandma (Send Her the News, Not the Wishes)

What she wants is the news

There is an odd asymmetry in this card. She has a great deal of time and you have almost none, and both of you know it. You are writing on a train, or in a car park with the engine still ticking. She will read it in a room where the largest event of the morning was a trolley going past the door.

So the pull is to make your twenty minutes count by being profound. Do the opposite. Give her the news. What the dog destroyed, what the exam result was, who is being difficult about the wedding, whether the car passed its MOT and by how narrow a margin. That is how she stays in the middle of the family instead of being visited at the edge of it. I sent three sentences about a neighbour's hedge coming down and got a follow-up question two days later. Nobody has ever asked me a follow-up question about the words get well soon.

Second, and this is the part cards routinely skip: write it so a stranger can read it aloud. A card by a bed gets read by a nurse, by the neighbour who comes on Thursdays, by your aunt who has driven over, and by her, repeatedly, for weeks. Full sentences. Say who you are in the first line. Leave out the in-joke that needs three lines of setup, because somebody else's voice will be saying it and she will not want to explain herself to a healthcare assistant.

Third, she will minimise. Do not fuss. Do not come all that way. It is nothing, honestly. Believe about half of that. Plenty of grandmothers are frightened in a way they will never say to their own children and will say sideways to a grandchild, usually in the last ninety seconds of a phone call, on the way to hanging up.

A short illness, or a fall

A fall is not the same card as a chest infection, even when the injury turns out smaller than everyone feared. What frightens her is not the bruise. It is what a fall implies about next year, and the stairs, and whether anybody is about to start saying the word bungalow. Do not write be more careful. She knows. Write the ordinary news and a fixed date.

• Gran, I heard about the step. Nothing else here has changed: the boiler is still making that noise and I still have not fixed it. Rest, and I will ring on Sunday.
• Get well soon, Grandma. The garden is carrying on without you, which I know will annoy you enormously.
• You said not to make a fuss. This is not a fuss. This is a card.
• Feel better, Gran. Everyone here is fine and boring, which is the news you actually want.
• Do what the physio tells you. That is the entire message.

Surgery, and the weeks after

The operation is the short part. The long part is six weeks of being told to do less than she wants, in a house arranged for a version of herself who could reach the top shelf. Cards arrive the day before and then the post goes quiet. Send one for week three instead, when the novelty of being looked after has completely worn off. There is more on that timing in get well messages after surgery.

• Grandma, the surgeon has done his bit. Your job is the boring bit now, and you are better at boring than anyone I know.
• Thinking of you before Tuesday. I will be watching the clock at nine. Ring me when they give you your phone back.
• Get well, Gran. Week three is the one where you get sick of the sofa. Ring me in week three.
• New hip, same opinions.
• We have moved Sunday dinner to ours until you are back on your feet. The potatoes are worse. Everyone has said so out loud.

A hospital stay

Ward staff read the cards. Not out of nosiness, mostly, but because a woman in bed nine with four cards from named grandchildren is visibly a person with a life, and that changes how the room speaks to her. So write big enough to be read from standing. Put your relationship in the opening line even though she knows perfectly well who you are, because the person holding it up for her does not.

• Grandma, it is your granddaughter, writing on Wednesday morning. Everyone here is well. The washing machine is not, but that is a story for when you are home.
• Hello from all of us. Rest, eat whatever they bring you, and let them help you up.
• Grandma, I am writing this so it can be read out to you. So: the baby has two teeth now, the front two, and she bites.
• Eleven days is a long time in one room. We are counting them here as well.
• Love from your grandson. Back Thursday, with the good biscuits.

A care home, or rehab

"Do not tell your mother I said this, but I do not think I am going home."

My grandmother said that to me in a rehab bay in Southport, and then she changed the subject back to the hedge and we never returned to it. A rehab placement is always described as temporary, and she will not fully believe it, and she will not raise it with her own daughter. So do not promise her the house. Promise the things you can actually put a date on: a visit, a phone call, the truth as you currently understand it.

• Grandma, the room is not the point. You are still the person we ring to find out how long to boil a ham.
• Six weeks of physio and then they talk about the stairs. That is the plan as I understand it, and I will tell you the truth every time I come.
• Get well, Gran. Bring the crossword. I will bring the pen.
• Your chair is still here. So is the cat, who has taken it and shows no remorse.
• Whatever happens about the house, this part does not change. We are not going anywhere and neither are you.

Something long-term, that is not going away

Get well soon is a strange thing to post to a woman who has had the same condition for nine years. She is not going to get well. She is going to have a bad fortnight and then a better one. Write to this fortnight. And do not ask how the treatment is going, because she will say fine, and then feel she has to be interesting about it for your sake.

• Grandma, I am not going to ask how you are doing, because you will say fine. I am going to tell you what we did on Saturday instead.
• Bad month. I know. Here is a photograph of a shed I built badly.
• Thinking of you today, and on the ordinary days in between, which I know are the long ones.
• I do not expect a reply. I will keep sending these anyway.

Dementia

This card is only partly for her. It is also for the room, for the staff, and for whichever relative is sitting there at four in the afternoon with nothing left to say. All three of those are real reasons to send it and none of them is a lesser one.

Open with who you are, every single time, in a flat sentence. It is your granddaughter, the one with the twins, I came on Sunday. Not because she has forgotten. Because on some days she has, and on those days a card that assumes she remembers is a small test she has to fail on her own, in front of a stranger.

Then write it again next month. And the month after that, mostly the same. Repetition is not a failure here, it is the format. I watched a friend do this for the better part of two years. She posted her grandmother Hettie the same four sentences every few weeks with only the date changed, and Hettie read them as news each time, which is exactly what they were.

Here is where I go back on myself. I said at the top to leave out the in-joke, because a stranger has to read the card aloud. In a dementia unit, write the in-joke. Write the daft phrase she said to all of you for thirty years, the one about the good coat, the one that makes no sense to anybody who married in. Late memory keeps the worn grooves and loses the new ones, and a phrase repeated five hundred times across a kitchen table is worn very deep indeed. The healthcare assistant reading it out does not need to understand it. She might.

I believe both of those rules. I am not going to pretend they fit together.

• Grandma, it is your granddaughter. I came on Sunday and we had tea in the blue cups. I am coming again next Sunday.
• You are safe here. We know exactly where you are and we come often.
• Who has got the good coat on, then?
• You taught me to make pastry with cold hands. I still do it your way and it still works.
• Same card as last month, because it was all true last month. We love you. Thursday, as usual.

When she is not going to get better

Sometimes there is no recovery coming, the family has been told so, and she has almost certainly worked it out before any of you did. Get well soon is then a promise you cannot keep, and she will read it as her family being unable to look at her straight. Write something that will still be true in a month. Do not tip into a eulogy either, because she is ill and not gone, and being spoken about in the past tense while you are still in the room is its own small cruelty. Messages for a serious illness works through that register properly.

• I am not going to tell you to get well soon. I am going to tell you that I am coming on Friday, and the Friday after that.
• You have been the best thing in my life. I wanted it written down somewhere you can read it more than once.
• Thank you for every Sunday afternoon in that back kitchen. I am not saying goodbye. I am saying thank you, now, while you can hear it.

From a great-grandchild, or a child with a felt-tip

The card she propped against the water jug was not one of ours. It was a felt-tip horse with five legs, from a great-grandchild she had met twice, and it stayed at the front for the whole eleven days. Let the child dictate it and write down exactly what they say, mistakes included, then let them sign it themselves however that goes. Put the child's age and the date on the back in your own handwriting. She will ask, and whoever clears out that drawer in ten years will want to know.

• I hope you feel better. I have a blue bike now.
• Get well soon Great Grandma. I am six. I lost a tooth on Friday and it bled a bit.
• Dictated by Wilf, aged four: I want you to come to my house and see my dinosaur, he is the big one.
• Grandma, this is a horse. He is very clear that it is a horse. Get well soon from both of us.
• I drew our house. That is the door.

From eight hundred miles away

Distance makes these cards apologetic, and the apology is the least useful thing in the envelope. She does not want you to feel bad about it. She wants to be able to picture your week, so give her the weather where you are, the thing currently annoying you, and what time on Sunday the phone is going to go. Sorry I have not visited is a sentence about you. Half nine on Sunday is a sentence she can wait for.

• Gran, I am eight hours away and I hate it this week. Here is where I am: it is raining, I am revising, and the flat smells permanently of somebody else's cooking.
• I will ring at seven your time on Sunday, and every Sunday after that until you tell me to stop.
• Flights are booked for the 14th. It is on the calendar in pen.
• I think about your kitchen constantly. Get well, and put the kettle on for October.

Short lines for the card everyone signs

When one card goes round a family, seven people write get well soon and the eighth writes lots of love. Carve the news up before it goes out. One person takes the garden, one takes the great-grandchildren, one takes whatever the neighbours are up to. Sign legibly and say how you are related, for the same reason as everything else here. The same logic runs through get well messages for any family member, but grandmothers get the longest signing list of anybody.

• Rest up, Gran. Love from the Bristol lot.
• Get well soon. The tomatoes are in.
• Thinking of you. Bin day is Tuesday now, ridiculously.
• Love you, Grandma. Back soon, with the dog, briefly.

Turn it into a group card

A grandmother's card has a geometry problem. Four households, three time zones, one aunt who does not do post, and a paper card that gets started in somebody's kitchen and stalls there for eight days.

A get well ecard the whole family can sign takes the logistics out of it. One link goes into the family chat, everybody adds their own line and their own news, and the cousin in Perth writes at a sensible hour for Perth. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, print it for the locker if she would rather hold paper, and keep adding to it while she is still in. For short lines the younger ones can copy, get well soon messages has plenty.

If the news turns, the card you write then is a different card altogether. Condolence messages for the loss of a grandparent is the one to read on that day. Not this one.