Re-entry blues

The last couple of days have been crazy. Intense and sad and scary.

We were exhausted when Doug’s lovely sister picked us up at the air­port: we hadn’t slept much in the last 48 hours. And we were begin­ning to show the signs of some food pois­on­ing or trav­el­er’s diarrhea. We went to bed early, miss­ing my mother’s phone call to tell us my grand­mother had died.

The next morn­ing, I got a mes­sage and rang her back, got the news and cried while Doug held me. We went out and did a bunch of chores in a fug. As the after­noon wore on, it became more and more clear that Doug was not doing well. He star­ted to exper­i­ence severe stom­ach cramp­ing and by night he was losing liquid through “both exits, no wait­ing”. At about 8pm, I made the call that he was going to hos­pital. He got weaker and weaker wait­ing in the er but they finally took him back, pumped him with four liters of IV fluids, took a bunch of blood (with effort, as he was so dehyd­rated) and sent him home around 3.30am with scripts for anti-diarrhe­als and anti-biot­ics. He’s doing okay but weak. A lot better than last night though.

It means I’ve barely had a second to think about Grandma, although I just had a good chat with my cousin 

vanessa_rodd

about it and that was good. 

Mil­li­cent Levine was a strong woman. She went to a select­ive high school, Fort St Girls’ High School, at a time when few people com­pleted sec­ond­ary edu­ca­tion. She had twin girls, my mother and Vanes­sa’s mother, and brought them up for a while on her own while Grandpa was in the army in World War Two. She made little devils out of gum­nuts and cloth and I remem­ber stay­ing in a little room down­stairs at her house in North­bridge with a huge map of the world on it and pins in it where they’d been. It’s hard to say much about her that isn’t about her and Grandpa — them play­ing Scrabble together and so many other things. I can hear her voice clearly in my head but I think she didn’t know much what to do with her­self after he died. Whenever I asked her what she’d been up to, she always said “Noth­ing much,” and passed onto the next person. She must have been a strong person with her own mind to live with Grandpa all those years. As Vanessa and I were just saying, you don’t bring people home in our family unless they can hold their own in polit­ical dis­cus­sions at the dinner table.

I under­stand she went peace­fully, which is what she wanted. It was unex­pec­ted: although she was 90, she was mostly well. It’s just hard being far away.

I wrote this poem for her in 2005. Maybe it’s worth re-read­ing now.

That’s her in the middle. I’m sit­ting on her mother’s knee and that’s my mother on the far right. Four gen­er­a­tions of women. I’ll miss you Grandma. Travel safe.