All things must come to an end

Well, my grandmother finally ran out of space to fall.

She slipped into a coma on Monday night and died Tuesday morning.

We've got a lot of the family coming up today for the funeral tomorrow. I think it's going to be an interesting day.

I cried a bit when she died, and I was a bit at a loss for what to do with myself for the rest of the day, but I seem to be fairly unfazed, generally speaking. I don't know if it's because I'm going to be hit by some serious grief stuff later on, or if it's because I've eked out my grief over the years.

It's more of a shock for the family members who weren't based here, seeing her regularly for the past couple of years. Those of us who lived with her have been watching her die for some time now. In essence, she hasn't "just died", she's just stopped dying.

My mother's in the same boat. She hasn't cried yet and has managed to successfully keep herself busy with looking after everything. You can tell she's not sure what she feels, and she's a bit weirded out by it all.

It's hard to know how to feel about something like this. We've been expecting it, waiting for it, praying for it for years. This is something we wanted to happen, something we're actually relieved about, but we still know, on some level, that it's a sad and unfortunate thing.

Over the past year I have found myself actually angry about her continued existence. I loved my grandmother, and I didn't want her to be in so much pain for so long - and I knew she wouldn't have been if it wasn't part of our culture to keep people alive long after they've stopped living.

She should have died a year ago, when she got that infection. Instead, some doctor swooped in at the last minute, "saved her life" and probably felt good about it. Never mind the fact that it was too little, too late, and what they had left her with could hardly be called a life. It was an existence, and it was cruel and pointless.

So, yeah, my grandmother's death two days ago was a blessing. Something longed for and looked forward to. And I'm still not sure what I feel about it all.

I probably won't be for a while yet.

"She should have died hereafter; There would have been time for such a word."

Catcher

Catcher catcher Mason
Catch me if you can
I'm a fan of any man
Who knows just where he stands

Wind and sea and starshine
Are ever just the same
Catcher catcher Mason
Did you catch my name?

Catcher catcher Mason
Ever and again
There's a long and winding road
Which never feels the rain

All the world's a lost boat
The stars can never find
Catcher catcher Mason
I can catch in kind

Falling Slowly

My grandmother didn't die last weekend.

We were kind of expecting her to - she looked worse than she had for a while. There was trouble breathing, trouble swallowing and a throat infection of some sort (don't ask me which was caused by what), and it looked like something that might finally get the better of what's left of her.

But... she didn't die. She's slightly better now. I suppose I should be happy about that, and on one level I am. Mostly, I'm just resigned.

It reminded me, though, how we're still expecting her to die on poetic grounds. It's like we've read and heard too many stories about people dying once they've done this, that or the other, and we keep looking for the poetic moment of closure, after which she can "rest".

Time after time there's a moment, a milestone, a visit, an illness... and we think she's surely had enough now. Now she's had the chance to say or do x, y or z - so she should just go to sleep and let go... right?

Somehow we've all got this strange idea that life is some big switch that we can choose to keep on or turn off depending on whether or not we have the will to keep living. It's this concept that just seems to haunt the collective consciousness of our culture.

Watching my grandmother sink into death over the last few years, though, and looking at her neighbours in the nursing home doing the same thing, I don't think life is that co-operative.

I think it doesn't matter how much you might want to stop living, you just keep falling slowly until you've run out of space to fall.

The more we treat ourselves and our loved ones with medicines and care designed to "help" them, the more falling space we give them. Living longer is not necessarily living better - it's just living longer. We don't get to "drift away" just because we've had that final, poetic moment and "now we can rest". We just keep falling slowly...

At some point, life stops being a gift and becomes a sentence. No poetry in the world can change that.

For Nic

Not Quite Goodbye

And so you’re leaving here
You’re going away
And this is it, right now,
It’s your last day
We will be sad to see you go
But I won’t say goodbye
No, I won’t say goodbye

So I guess it’s:
So long, I’ll see you on Facebook
I’ll RSS your blog to my reader
I’ll chat to you on Tuesday if we’re both online
I have to say:
It’s true, we are gonna miss you
We’ll miss your face around these parts
But once you get that webcam we’ll all be just fine

Goodbye is just so last century

And now the time has come
To pack up your things
And when tomorrow comes
You’ll spread your wings
You know, we hate to see you go
But I won’t say goodbye
No, I won’t say goodbye

So I guess it’s:
So long, I’ll see you on Facebook
I’ll RSS your blog to my reader
I’ll chat to you on Tuesday if we’re both online
I have to say:
It’s true, we are gonna miss you
We’ll miss your face around these parts
But once you get that webcam we’ll all be just fine

Goodbye is just so last century

High Romance

I'm reading Jane Eyre again.

I have to admit, that can be a little dangerous. I have a thing about Charlotte Brontë's novels - particularly Villette and especially Jane Eyre.

I just seem to move into a different head space where nothing seems to be entirely real or applicable unless it has something to do with Gothic Romance.

What do I care of your petty, work-a-day questions when there are souls rent asunder by cruel circumstance?

Who can condone wasting time on statistics and what-not when there are those who feel such keen pain, having to watch the one they love pledge themselves to one inferior to them? Or, worse still, one perfectly suited and superior in every way?

Do you think my heart made of stone, that I can tolerate such careless questions as "what did you bring for lunch" when she may never see him again - and the hurt is such that it stops her very breath in her throat?

*Ahem*

Sorry about that.

Plus, Jane Eyre is one of those triggers which makes me remember all the books I was going to write, and I start thinking about those plots again. Stories I'm reading and stories I'm dreaming just seem to swirl around in my brain, and I have great difficulty focusing on the here and now.

Strangely, I don't have this problem with Austen. I think she might have been too tame - not quite "high" enough to take my brain and knock it sideways. Sure, Pride and Prejudice kind of rocks, but it doesn't have me off in la-la land so thoroughly.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though can have me reeling after just one sonnet. I think if I ever read Jane Eyre and Sonnets from the Portugese at the same time I would be rendered completely useless.

I'd probably enjoy it, though...

We all spend our holidays in Viljandi

Strangely, since coming back to Australia, the part of Estonia that keeps playing on my mind is not Palmse, which was one of the most beautiful places I've been to in my life, nor Tallinn, which was quite a nice city with a brilliant fusion of ancient and modern. Nor was it Tartu, where I happily spent three days, and probably would have stayed for longer had I not been on a mission to see more of the country.

No, it's Viljandi. I was there for about 24 hours, and saw most of the place in one morning walk. I thought it was a nice enough town - nicer than many of the other towns I had seen, but nothing terribly thrilling or gripping...

Yet I keep thinking it would be a nice place to live, or at least stay for a summer holiday. Okay beach, nice lake, nice parks, nice ruined castle thingy... nice spirit. I want to see it when it's not raining - after all, it was nice enough when freezing cold and wet.



Thinking about it now, I realise I liked the 'feel' of the place - the folk music center, the castle that doubled as an out-door theatre, the puppet theatre (which wasn't showing anything during the time when I was there, dammit) and all that jazz. I'm used to small towns being a little bit country. This place was a little bit folksy - and fiercely proud of it.

It was nice. It was the kind of place where you could relax, but still be in the heart of something. You could listen to a concert or go for a long walk beside the lake. You could be part of a festival, or just sit in a park and read a book.

I think nice places don't get enough praise for simply being nice.

Some places just feel good. Viljandi is one of them.

Things librarians try not to think about

I received this explanation for a system malfunction in an email this morning:

Services have been restored on the HPRC NAS servers. A full filesystem, due to core dumps from DMF software, caused the High Availability software to "flap". The filesystem is common to both servers, hence the service wouldn't start succesfully on either server, leading to the "flapping". Scripts are being written to avoid
this particular problem in future.

I have a feeling I don't even want to know what it means. Sadly, I think this was meant to be the "user friendly" version.



PS, the quote is cut and paste from the email - their spelling errors, not mine.