annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Slowing Down

I managed to get myself in a right state over the last week or however long it's been but have been trying to pull it all back together.

It's been hard because:

• It's coming up to two years since Elder Daughter was in the hospice for end of life care. Although she made it through, we were warned that she wouldn't have long and although she has had long, she can't speak or move and is fading slowly, slowly and it's torture for us all, it's real fucking torture.


• It's too long. IT'S TOO LONG. I can't live like this - you couldn't live like this, could you? Well nor can I. But here I am. And I don't want it to END, not that, but I would like it to stop, somehow, be something else now, but not that.


• I miss her and her smart-arse, clever-clogs, thrashing me at scrabble ways. I really fucking miss her, our family misses her, there's a big, bossy hole in our family where she should be and we're all less for her not being there telling us we're a bunch of hippy stoner fuck-ups


• She's very sleepy a lot of the time. Most of the time.


• No one else comes to see her so I don't have anyone to chat about her with, to go over it all - how she seems compared to last time, last week, last month. Fuckers, I hate them all.


• I have to do  a form called 'future plans' but it's an end of life plan - it's so that we don't get in a flap when we can't think straight, like we did last time, and we should have done it back then, when she made it through, but we didn't get round to it. It is unbearable, last fucking straw - it mentions funerals, ffs, I hadn't let myself go as far as letting that thought co-exist with ED in my mind since those hideous first days in the hospice, so confronting that has been less than good. And there's no money to pay for a funeral, hers, mine, Bloke's.


• We don't know what she wants - the form is full of things like 'Is there anything you'd want to avoid happening in your final days?' and these are questions we can't ask - where she used to blink strongly to indicate 'yes' she doesn't do that reliably any more and even if she did I can't imagine anything worse than trying and struggling to establish how she'd like to die through the medium of blinking for yes. So we're meeting, me, her sister, her brother and her son, to see if we can thrash out answers to questions we don't want to have to answer when things are even worse. Younger Daughter is meant to be telling GrandSon about all this, but I don't think she has yet


• I've taken on too much as well. But I've cleared a few things out of my weekly plans - the Silver Swans - don't know if I even mentioned that - ballet for old ladies, but only on at times that made other things complicated, so it had to go. Singing group - I love that but don't think I can do it. It still leaves too much but I have to get out every day - art and yoga are essential, as is walking, both for me and the dog, and I'm committed to those two writing groups. Wish I wasn't to be honest, but there you go.


• And I have a thing where if I send ten pages of writing to this place they might let me send 50,000 words to a literary consultancy for proper editorial feedback. My writing mentor is working there now and she's urging me to do it so I'm trying to find some good pages from my blog but I'M TIRED.

1. Things that are getting on my nerves:  ... parking, to be precise, parallel parking, in a narrow street with cars parked on both sides, is doing my head in so much that I only drive when it can't be avoided. So far I've managed to scrape a thick line all along a neighbour's car without realising I was doing it, which unnerved me so much that since then I've twice had to abandon the poxy car, after edging forward and back so many times that I lost all sense of which way I needed to turn the fucking steering wheel. The first time there was a chirpy looking bloke loading stuff into a van, so I swallowed my pride (such as it is) and asked him if he'd mind parking for me. Of course he was happy to do it, didn't mind a bit, the bastard. The second time I really persevered, even to the point of crying, pulling myself together, trying again for another three or four goes, crying again, pulling myself together again, and only then spotting the old git watching me stoney-faced from his window, a mere three feet away. That was it, I got out and left the car half on the pavement at an interesting angle, fled indoors, drew the curtains and waited till Matey-Boy came round and sorted it out. As soon as the money comes through I'm booking me a parking lesson from a driving instructor.


2.  I went up to see ED yesterday. She's having a bad episode of MS and just needed a big hug from her Mummy. Fucking MS. What else is there to say about it? It causes me to reach down deep inside and find the ability to appear calm and solid for the duration of the visit, but that evaporates in seconds when I leave and then I can hardly drive for the intensity of the desire to make it better for my baby, my lovely lovely ED. Unlucky. Not as unlucky as her and she's not as unlucky as others, but it fucking stinks, everything about it.   Anyway, SIL had been called out to mend some bastard farmer's tractor and GS had been cooped up indoors all day so I took him down the park for a game of football. There are very very few kids in their village, but we did gain a four-year-old boy who was keen to play. Two on one, with Granny in goal. I was pretty good, I thought, but I may have been alone in this opinion. The little boy, I gradually realised, was either quite deaf or quite 'special needs' or just a total space cadet, but we all laughed and laughed and laughed, so it was all pretty good. Giggling with kids in the autumn sunshine - should be available to all.


3. And then I found out my uncle died today. My step-uncle, Ma's little brother, who has had strokes and then cancer and finally went after sliding into unconsciousness a few days ago. May he rest in peace. It feels strange to have somebody die and not be devastated, but I'm not. I am concerned about how it's all going to pan out about the funeral and stuff. Ma is particularly hard to deal with around death. When Dad died she scorned any show of emotion from any of us and certainly didn't display any herself. She had his dog put down, cleared the house of all his belongings, all before the funeral. When her 'best friend' Bunty died she attended the funeral, tss-ing throughout, but refused to go back to the house. I know everyone deals with things in their own way, but it's hard when it feels so disrespectful. My step-brother, who lives in France, is close in age to this uncle, was brought up living next door to him and has remained close. He's saying he can't face staying with Ma for the funeral if she's going to carry on as if Uncle's death is some kind of minor inconvenience. I know where he's coming from, but if he doesn't stay with her we'll never hear the end of it. We've all been on the phone to each other, with my sister and other brother as well, round and round, but it'll all fall out how it does. It's a death - who's going to be happy? There's also the ex-wife, who tried to visit him and was denied - she'll almost certainly be at the funeral with the daughter and Ma has never restrained herself in expressing her contempt for them. Ah well.


4. Aw man, I just bunged a couple of cherry tomatoes into my mouth as I sat down at the computer, but before I'd actually finished the last bite of the banana. Just not thinking, about to start typing, need both hands, bung tomatoes in gob as if the banana had never existed, or was long since finished. Ah well, the surprising taste has gone now and I'm hungry again, but I've lost me nerve.

12:08 a.m. - 23.01.19

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