MND stole my dear Grandma Grace but the fightback is on

BACK in 2015, while living and working in Dubai, I did what millions of others were doing: I poured a bucket of freezing cold water over my head for the Ice Bucket Challenge. It was a viral campaign to raise awareness of motor neurone disease and at the time, I thought it was a fun, worthy gesture. Little did I know just how personal that campaign would become.

- JJ Anisiobi

Shortly after filming my video, I received a message from my sisters back in the UK. They'd visited our Grandma Grace Mbengeranwa and were alarmed by how much weight she’d lost. She was struggling to walk and something didn’t seem right. I hadn’t seen her for a while — living thousands of miles away meant our visits were all too rare — and suddenly I was filled with dread.

Grandma Grace was my rock. She had shaped me more than anyone except my mother. Born in Zimbabwe, she trained as a midwife in England, eventually moving to Denmark in the 1960s, where she answered a national call for nurses.

She didn’t speak Danish when she arrived and was the only Black woman in the town of Aarhus. Despite that, she carved out a life with strength, courage and determination — helping women give birth, even while enduring racism and resistance from some of the very people she was caring for.

EVENTUALLY she became fluent in Danish and, by the time I came along, she was teaching me about Norse mythology, Scandinavian culture and the power of language. For my eighth birthday, she bought me an English-Danish dictionary and told me I could only text her in Danish — her way of teaching me something new.