My mother’s best friend is sick with coronavirus. She also suffers from dementia, so she likely won’t know about it or be able to understand what is happening to her – she’s just going to endure a terminal period of painful breathing, agony and frustration, medical isolation: a bodily grief. Like many people, this woman […]
Tomorrow is my Mum’s birthday, she’s eighty. Tomorrow is already today in Brisbane because Australia is tomorrowland. I rang her on the videophone we used to so dread in my youth. She looks pretty in her top and skirt. I had a red ‘H’ and a purple ‘B’ from the cafe table where I sat […]
I just got a letter from my mother explaining she has been in hospital for five days with bronchial pneumonia. Mum is in Brisbane and I am in Berlin and no one told me. She’s 78 years old and had a hip and a knee replaced this year, since my father’s death. This is the […]
Alone in the house for the first time in days I feel a sadness descend and take me in its wings. I’m sad for Dad. It has come from pottering and tidying, I washed up a bowl and set it upside down on the board to drain, I folded a pair of his old pyjamas […]
The little cat puts her hand possessively on my arm. After a moment’s thought her other hand creeps up to join it and I remember the day I finally found her again, after she had been lost for a lifetime, five months at large in the laneways of inner Melbourne, and a man rang in […]
I’m at my parents’ place spending some time with my dying father. He is frail as a leaf. This morning two Blue Care nurses turned up, funded by Australians’ taxes, and hauled him up the bed so hard they bashed his head against the headboard. When he is sleeping, which is much of the time, […]
My dad has cancer. They thought he had got rid of it but now, it’s back. It’s in his spine. My mother habitually announces things with enormous flourish. A printer jam, a forgotten shopping list: “We’ve got a major disaster on our hands.” This time she wrote an understated letter. “Not good news, my darling.”