My puppies have worked out a new dance routine. I sing the old ’60s number from the Beatles, All You Need is Love, catchy and repetitive and they do back flips with happiness and mother love. Very endearing and it stops them from chewing up the sofa covers for a few minutes longer.
I woke up this morning late to a room fillled with hot sunlight. I was shaking and icy with sweat because I had had a dream in which my father was unable to die.
My father has been in a coma for eight months in Hawaii. His condition remains unchanged. My sister-in-law Susan is still visiting him at the hospital and he cannot be moved. My sister Kath in New Zealand and I exchange emails and just wait for him to die. I have spent so many years not knowing what to say or do as regards my family that I am used to living with unresolved trauma in the background. My brother H has disappeared and is still drinking on some Hawaiian island. I have read up quite a bit on people in comas and it is very mystifying, one of those twilight zones of severe incapacitating illness. He is not in pain as far as can be ascertained.
And on a minor note, it is driving me crazy not to be able to edit my posts. The typos and run-ons upset me so much I can’t reread my own posts. There is no way for me to ensure accurate copy unless I write it all else where and import it and then I can’t alter fonts or use hypertext. So I am apologising for all the typos and uncorrected grammar.
My housemate has traded in my Ford Icon, a modest and unassuming car, for a great old 4×4 beast with no air-conditioning and a tendecy to guzzle diesel. She can get more sick patients into the back and cart them off to clinics and hospitals.
Out here in Africa when people who are reasonably well-off find themselves surrounded by destitute, ill and dying people in the midle of a plague, they either pretend it isn’t happening or they get involved and ado service insofar as it is humanly possible. Una loves working with home-based carers and despite the disruptive and heartbreaking side of it, so do I. So that great diesel-guzzling beast is here to stay.
Posted by louisey 