I am visiting family this weekend, over the water of the Tasman Sea. Seeing my grandparents, as my grandfather has been pretty ill the last six months or so. He has battled prostate cancer for the better part of a decade, and something is up with his lungs the past few months - possibly a secondary cancer, possibly just a cold or flu - but his general level of illness is such that he is healthy enough for the moment, but when things do go wrong, they will go wrong very very quickly. It might be anytime in the next eighteen months when that something happens.
Have felt guilty that it has been two years since I have seen them last - while my mother is going over every two or three months, they are her parents after all, my father gets over every six months, and my siblings have each been over more recently than I, well, yes, feelings of guilt have been affecting me about all this. The sense of avoidance perhaps strongest among those feelings.
Being there will be good, flying over tomorrow, Friday, coming back Monday, but the hard part will be saying goodbye on the way home. Not looking forward to that at all. And my grandfather is a lot frailer than I saw him last apparently, and he is a lot vaguer than he used to be. The onset of dementia or Alzheimer's perhaps.
About eight to ten years ago it would have been now, I was back from Europe, my parents had not yet left for Oz, and we all lived down the road from the grandparents. Or, whenever I was moving around between flats, I used to come back and stay with the parents maybe every second weekend. The point being, that on Saturday afternoons, we went a-visiting to the grandparents, and a very traditional paternalistic setting of roles ensued. The women stayed home to chat and stuff, while the men went over to the pub.
Of course, when I was a kid and we used to live in the same town as the grandparents we went around to visit and all that, but as a kid we had the afternoon filled with Mickey Mouse and Woody Woodpecker video cassettes. Being a man in that eight to ten year ago timeslot meant I went over with my father, grandfather and sometimes an uncle to the pub.
In between me watching the rugby, or each of us shouting a jug, or the obligatory hot chips with extra salt, I just loved listening to my grandfather talk about how things were in his younger days. He was too young to get drafted into WW2, thank goodness, but still he had stories of going into Wellington and seeing fights between the white and black US soldiers, seeing some of them just lying in the streets in pools of blood, possibly beaten up by the MPs to 'restore order'. How he worked in some sort of mechanics yard, where he made things out of junk metal, which was pretty rare anyways back in those days, rationing and all, and a lot of the stuff going off to Mother England - or how they came across stuff and didn't report it, to get around the rationing.
Or the post war period, when the Dutch got kicked out of their East Indies - now Indonesia. One of my grandfather's buddies was known as 'The Dutchman', and apparently he had been part of the army sent out to Indonesia to try and re-pacify it. Instead, on the losing side of another of those south east Asian wars, he came to NZ and settled down.
I always meant to just put a tape recorder down on the table and just record the conversation, where ever it went, but of course best intentions up against my habitual procrastination, well, no guesses as to what side of me won there. And now, if he is really starting to be vague about things, well, it may be too late already to get those old stories out of him again.
It may be a gruelling few days if things have really gone as downhill as I have been hearing. But at least I am not avoiding anything for any longer than I have already - it will be great to see them, but it may be a bit painful to say goodbye.
Just thinking back to that last goodbye of Dad's father, who died in 1991. A week after we had our last visit and he was so ill and everyone kind of sensed that he didn't have much left in him, and trying to think back to what 15 year old Paul was thinking - I think I thought it was very awkward, saying what felt like a final goodbye, and with a lot of the family members around, extended family members, just giving a weakish handshake.
Or thinking back to two years ago even, when last I saw Mum's parents, not knowing when I would see them again, and giving both grandparents a huge hug.
Can't write any more tonight, the screen is fogging up for some reason.
Paul
Have felt guilty that it has been two years since I have seen them last - while my mother is going over every two or three months, they are her parents after all, my father gets over every six months, and my siblings have each been over more recently than I, well, yes, feelings of guilt have been affecting me about all this. The sense of avoidance perhaps strongest among those feelings.
Being there will be good, flying over tomorrow, Friday, coming back Monday, but the hard part will be saying goodbye on the way home. Not looking forward to that at all. And my grandfather is a lot frailer than I saw him last apparently, and he is a lot vaguer than he used to be. The onset of dementia or Alzheimer's perhaps.
About eight to ten years ago it would have been now, I was back from Europe, my parents had not yet left for Oz, and we all lived down the road from the grandparents. Or, whenever I was moving around between flats, I used to come back and stay with the parents maybe every second weekend. The point being, that on Saturday afternoons, we went a-visiting to the grandparents, and a very traditional paternalistic setting of roles ensued. The women stayed home to chat and stuff, while the men went over to the pub.
Of course, when I was a kid and we used to live in the same town as the grandparents we went around to visit and all that, but as a kid we had the afternoon filled with Mickey Mouse and Woody Woodpecker video cassettes. Being a man in that eight to ten year ago timeslot meant I went over with my father, grandfather and sometimes an uncle to the pub.
In between me watching the rugby, or each of us shouting a jug, or the obligatory hot chips with extra salt, I just loved listening to my grandfather talk about how things were in his younger days. He was too young to get drafted into WW2, thank goodness, but still he had stories of going into Wellington and seeing fights between the white and black US soldiers, seeing some of them just lying in the streets in pools of blood, possibly beaten up by the MPs to 'restore order'. How he worked in some sort of mechanics yard, where he made things out of junk metal, which was pretty rare anyways back in those days, rationing and all, and a lot of the stuff going off to Mother England - or how they came across stuff and didn't report it, to get around the rationing.
Or the post war period, when the Dutch got kicked out of their East Indies - now Indonesia. One of my grandfather's buddies was known as 'The Dutchman', and apparently he had been part of the army sent out to Indonesia to try and re-pacify it. Instead, on the losing side of another of those south east Asian wars, he came to NZ and settled down.
I always meant to just put a tape recorder down on the table and just record the conversation, where ever it went, but of course best intentions up against my habitual procrastination, well, no guesses as to what side of me won there. And now, if he is really starting to be vague about things, well, it may be too late already to get those old stories out of him again.
It may be a gruelling few days if things have really gone as downhill as I have been hearing. But at least I am not avoiding anything for any longer than I have already - it will be great to see them, but it may be a bit painful to say goodbye.
Just thinking back to that last goodbye of Dad's father, who died in 1991. A week after we had our last visit and he was so ill and everyone kind of sensed that he didn't have much left in him, and trying to think back to what 15 year old Paul was thinking - I think I thought it was very awkward, saying what felt like a final goodbye, and with a lot of the family members around, extended family members, just giving a weakish handshake.
Or thinking back to two years ago even, when last I saw Mum's parents, not knowing when I would see them again, and giving both grandparents a huge hug.
Can't write any more tonight, the screen is fogging up for some reason.
Paul
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