Midday thursday (deadline day) I get a call from my aunt: Grandpa has taken a sudden turn for the worse. The afternoon is a blur of flight changes and trying to concentrate on the issue at hand. My aunt suggests I call the ward and she’ll hold the phone to Grandpa’s ear just in case. I go for a walk at one point, shortly after this, very upset. At just that moment, Melanie, my sister, calls. She is stuck looking after the twins she nannies and we have a wonderful conversation about Grandpa and our feelings of helplessness. I try to call Brandon and let him know what’s happening. The people at my new work are amazing: incredibly sensitive and comforting. I leave work at five, head to the uni, give my lecture to my students, shaky and possibly incoherent. My students are also supportive. After the class, I stay back until 9.30pm sorting through some student work that absolutely has to be done ready for Monday. My flight is at 8.30am. I have little time to pack. I go to dinner with sleazemonkey and Cameron and my colleague Dale. I try to make the world make sense but it doesn’t any more. Grandpa could die any moment and I won’t have said goodbye. I feel as though I am detached from the world and there is a dotted outline where I should be.
The flight goes smoothly. Mum picks me up from the airport and takes me to the hospital. Grandpa looks like a dessicated, emaciated corpse already: his skin is stretched over him and has become translucent. His mouth is agape. He hasn’t eaten for over a week. Somehow, my mind is instantly calm. I go to him and take his hand. He is barely conscious. I tell him it’s me, and start to talk to him, a little hesitant. I think he knows it’s me. Mum suggests I tell him about Brandon, and I do. She goes to fetch Grandma. I’m alone with Grandpa. I tell him all sorts of things. I tell him I love him. I tell him arguing with him as a teenager honed my political senses. I tell him my first memory of him is of the mouth casts he made of me after I knocked my front teeth out as a toddler (he’s a dentist).
I make up a story for him that I’ll have to write up properly sometime, about a girl exploring a labyrinthine library who keeps getting distracted by the scrolls and books and knowledge in the rooms, while she’s searching for a way out. Finally she encounters Azaquiel, the astronomer, making his maps of the machinery of the universe and she asks a thousand questions. Azaquiel tells her that she will never understand the stars by looking at his measurements and that she must explore them for herself. She finds a magic carpet and climbs aboard, sails out the window and into the vastness of the universe, the wild nothingness of the starscape where she finds peace at last.
I spend about six hours with him. It’s good. I kiss him goodbye and then I’m writing this in my head and off to meet Brandon for dinner. He could die over the weekend, but I’ll only be a few hours away: I can come back immediately anything happens. They say people can last for ten days like this.