Man, I really don’t want to do this morning. Feels like there is so much to do and so many possibilities and so much chance of more frustration, disappointment and grief. I was kind of just managing with what I already had on my plate but yesterday my phone decided to shit itself and the screen does not respond to any touch input at all. I know that it is just a phone, a thing, and not important in the “grand scheme,” but it’s what it does that is the source of my frustration. It lets me play games and distract myself, it lets me take pictures and escape into looking at other people’s pictures, it lets me find out information right now that I would otherwise worry about until I get home and can use the computer.

It’s also the third time in less than a year since I got it that I have had to return it for fixing, and that is just fricking annoying. When I got it there were dead pixels in the camera, and that got fixed; then a few months later it had the same problem as I have now. We (well, Daniel, coz I made him ring up, since their stupid website 500ed in the last step of the ticket process) told them that enough is enough and they need to replace it rather than just keep giving the same, obviously faulty one back. Someone has to “assess” whether it is worth doing that and I have to take it to a place in Carindale. Coz I just love going to Carindale by myself.

By myself, because mum is not here. She is at the Sunshine Coast again, though probably for the last time for a while. She left straight from the hospital after last Wednesday’s disaster. Coz Grandad went into the hospice on Tuesday afternoon. I couldn’t remember what it was called when I was trying to tell Daniel, and I told him that he was going to the “dying house place.” Hospice is another one of those words, the ones that try to delicately skirt around topics that some people find hard. And it sounds like hospital and sort of gives the illusion of possible recovery. I think so, anyway. But we know that is not going to happen. The cancer in his stomach has taken over so much that there is barely any room for it it digest and absorb, and it is plainly obvious to look at him that his reduced appetite has resulted in his body burning away all possible reserves of fat and energy it had, just to keep going. But he did, and he made it to their anniversary, which he said he was going to do even when we all thought he would be gone last school holidays, before Abigail’s birthday. I think that he doesn’t want to go to the next great adventure without his sidekick (though actually I think maybe he’s the sidekick and she’s the ‘headline’ superhero.)  I get that. Of all the things I the world, I relate to that most of all. So I think that his determination has kept him going for this long and that is kind of amazing in itself, but I don’t think that the spirit can power the body indefinitely, a body is a finite resource. And as the saying goes, he is running on fumes. 

So one day very soon even those will be exhausted and that will be the end. This waiting for someone to die is very much like waiting for someone to be born, nature and the universe have a timetable that we are not privy to. But when you are waiting for a birth it is anticipation of joy, and when you are waiting for death it is.. not. We had this, to some degree, with Lisa, but we were removed physically and didn’t have that edge of a cliff, dread of imminent change that we have been expecting for, like.. months,  now. She was sick but not “die any day sick” until much closer to the end. Doctors have told us he would be gone a year ago, or two, even. Part of me wants to be mad at them. How can you make mistakes like that and make people live with this dread for so long? Yet I know the answer is that for all they know, the body is still in some regards, very much still a mystery. Especially where the power of one’s will comes into play.

But this also relates back to my other main problem right now. If doctors will tell you that when someone is dying and they underestimate or overestimate the time that is left because the body is not a well oiled machine that follows an instruction manual, then how can this man from last week look at us and so firmly and dispassionately tell us that he is absolutely right and we just need to deal? It can’t be both ways. How are we mere lay people meant to navigate and make sense of it all when even doctors can’t explain everything?