Family
In the time of Estrangement
Covid didn’t just kill millions world wide and put us all in lockdown at various times in those first couple of years of struggles, it all but destroyed people’s relationships and sanity in so many ways. I know two dear friends of mine who I helped introduce never survived living together in tight quarters, each unable to escape the other when things got really bad. While a couple of other friends said they grew closer together from everything they went through, and, as nurses, they went through a lot.
For me and mine, things quietly went on mostly as they always had, like a comfortable pair of socks, we just fit together. We adapted and changed a few things but, as homebodies and relative dormice, we didn’t miss the going out, we had what we needed. And what we didn’t have, we ordered in where possible. And if we couldn’t, we made do. I can’t say it was perfect and we weren’t obsessively cleaning everything, or terrified like everyone else on the planet. But we somehow managed bolstering one another were we could.
The one thing that those couple of terrible years cemented and brought home to me was the fact I was—even before the start of the Covid era— fully estranged from people who were once my family. People who I once thought I knew but, in the end, really didn’t know any more than any one of them knew me. Or even cared to know the real me.
It’s one of life’s greatest sadnesses that these people are no longer in my life and, from all accounts, have no interest in being in my life. That’s fine, that is, to a certain extent, their choice. But that some of those people also chose to poison others who might have kept in touch, is what still hurts.
I’m bringing this up now as a number of seminal anniversaries have just passed and where, at one time in my life I would have flown home to join in the parties and or sent cards and gifts. Now, there’s just an awareness that these people are my past, no longer to be in my life, and certainly never to be in my future.
It’s been a long while for me, accepting that I don’t know whether any of them are even still alive or, even care to know whether me and my partner are. I guess I might never know.
That sadness I once felt in my heart has slowly eased and that, after all, is what matters. I can no longer mourn the loss of something I probably never had to begin with, their love, or even, their respect.
My Sister and Other Strange Phenomena
My sister breaks things.
It’s a fact—a family fact.
She doesn’t just break ordinary things like you or I might do; dishes, glassware, bones in our body, no. My sister breaks things like, the internet.
What? Oh, okay, so maybe it wasn’t her, per se, who caused Google to have a nervous breakdown the other day, thereby causing everyone one on the planet to collectively hold their breathes. But we, that is, our family, on hearing of another Google outage immediately think, Sis! Yes, we actually text and or message one another asking, did she do it, did she break Google again?
You see, my sister has this knack, put her within 3 feet of a remote handset and you can guarantee it, and any programme you might have set to record will either start in the middle, end before it’s supposed to, record another channel entirely, doesn’t record because it set itself to another century from now, or simply doesn’t work.
Life After Death
Or, how I survived the loss of my parents.
Surviving a loved one’s death can only be personal and subjective. We all react differently, we all perceive differently, we all emote differently. Some feel the loss more keenly than others, some not so much. But one thing you can be sure of is, the loss of a loved one changes you no matter what your relationship was till that point.
I lost my father to lung cancer in 1991, he was only 68 years of age. His ‘illness’ was slow, debilitating, terrifying and painful right through till the last few weeks when, being cared for in our local hospice, my father passed quietly, almost peacefully after his (and yes, our) two year ordeal.
Heroic in her efforts and, till those last few weeks, my mother took on the all but lonely burden of looking after my father almost singlehandedly. Albeit with help, where we could, from the rest of us. Supporting and bolstering my mother, where we could, during a time where home care from any nursing services was, at best, minimal. Closer to the end, and before he was lucky enough to get into hospice care—and yes, I say lucky, because, due to space limitations, and the lack of hospice care in general, most people either die at home, or in hospital. And usually, with minimal care and attention. My mother had to feed, bath, dress and care for my father—a man she had already dedicated her life to for most of her adult life, sharing all the highs and lows along the way and giving birth to, and bringing up six children.