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.