The much needed entry

Friday, Nov. 12, 2004 - 11:16 am

I started this entry last night but never got to finish it, so I'll finish it now.

Hi there, like I said, I'm going to write a little bit more, much to the probable dismay of William Lebreton (yay for you William! Physics certificate! AND a helluva lotta GCSE A grades! *hug*)

Anyway, yes. I have a lot of things to say, but I'll probably have to cut it short due to Mum telling me to go to sleep. Although I'm not particularly upset right at this moment in time, this entry's likely to become pretty depressing, just a forewarning for you all. Well, we never know, it might not.

Things I need to talk about (including some old topics I listed.. earlier (I've put these in yellow)):
Mum + Dad
November 19th
Effects
Grandad Harry
Me
Cosplay
Atheism
College problems
America
Shopping today
Job problems
Job stories

This Mum and Dad divorcing thing, well I'm now pretty sure it was a product of Mum's upsetness. She does say some stupid things when she's upset. And she does get upset for some stupid and incomprehensible reasons (like the fact that one day I told her that I didn't really want to eat crackers for lunch (she started screaming and crying at me) *shrug*)

I was listening to Mum on the phone yesterday, talking about Grandad Harry (the one who's not dead). She was saying to dad (I presumed) that he's muddly and was describing some of the things he's done. From what I heard I felt with the upmost dread that he's in danger of going the way Grandad Ken did. It's like the whole Ken situation all over again. This is the way it started, with him, you see. And it would be dreadful to watch another one of my close friends and relatives slowly lose his mind until he finally dies, a shell of what he was before. Can you imagine the helplessness something like that feels like? Grandad Ken had one of the sharpest minds I knew of, and I watched it crumble to dust agonisingly slowly over four months. I do hope that whatever's wrong with grandad Harry, it won't be the same as what was wrong with Grandad Ken.

November the 19th 2002, 9:15am. Grandad died. In seven days he will have been gone for a whole two years. I haven't really written about the events surrounding his death. Sure, I've written about his death, but up until now I've been most unprepared to write about what happened otherwise. He was admitted into hospital because of a bowel problem. He'd been pretty 'muddly' before he was admitted, and we all assumed that that was the reason. A few nights into his being there he had a mini-stroke which we weren't all that concerned about - after all, he'd suffered two or three mini-strokes before and he'd been perfectly fine just a few weeks afterwards. What are strokes, anyway, and what exactly do they do to you? And why are they called strokes? Well from there he got worse and worse. He lost his ability to speak and basically lost anything that made him him. He was very childlike, it was like looking at a baby in a man's body. I remember there was one time while Mum and I were at his bedside, before it got so bad that he couldn't leave the bed, and he went up to mum and opened up her hand, making the motions of giving her something. Only he wasn't actually holding anything. He got rather fustrated that Mum wouldn't take whatever he thought he was giving her. Eventually mum figured it out "Thank you, Dad." Satisfied, he went on with 'eating his tea' (which was in fact just him holding an imaginary fork and spooning mouthfuls of air into his mouth and chewing).

It was really sad to see.

There was another time when he could speak, and we were just leaving. Benji and I were in the room. Now grandad had just come out of yet another coma and a few days before Dad had told him (while grandad was in the coma) that Benji'd gotten a really good grade in school. Well just as we were leaving that day Grandad stopped us and called to Benji "You're clever, you are!" and motioned to give Benji a big hug. That was really sweet.

When we got the phone call a week before he died telling us that they thought he wouldn't last the night we all rushed into the car to the hospital where we remained by his bedside for a good portion of the day. It was awful to see him. He had tonnes of plastic tubing stuck up his nose, through his veins, down his throat. He smelt of faeces, since he couldn't get up to go to the toilet, they'd given him a catheter thingy. He had an oxygen over his mouth and every breath sounding like water running down a sink and coming unbearably irregularly. He was very thin, and you could see his bones under his pale skin. He used to be constantly tanned, but you could see that his normal skin colour had faded and was now a very white brown (I know that doesn't make sense, but that's what it looked like). We were standing at the bottom of his bed, watching him struggle for life. Dad started whispering things to his father, looking increasingly upset, until I eventually walked over to him and gave him a cuddle. He completely broke down. I've rarely if ever seen my dad cry, but his tears... It takes a lot to make dad cry. I myself felt completely numb, devoid of any emotion, as it was for me for much of the duration of his illness and a while after his death. It just seemed like it was happening to someone else. Someone else like my father. I couldn't imagine what he was going through - to lose his father, the one who raised him.

Well it turned out that grandad did last the night -- barely. When he died on the 19th November

Ah I have to go. I'll finish later.

���

---