stranger than fiction

The events of yesterday were so bizarre that I hardly know how to make any sense of them, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

Everything started with the passing of my mother's mother, Grandma Mary, Sunday night/very early Monday morning. This is really considered a blessing by all, as the poor old thing was ninety years old and had been suffering from dementia for years and had been living in a nursing home for the last five years or so, and by her own admission has been ready to go for just as long.

But the way I received this information was a bit freaky, to turn a phrase.

The phone rang at 8:00 in the morning, and the quickest way to get me out of bed is hearing Steph speak English on the phone so early, knowing that anyone we should be receiving calls from in the English-speaking world is most likely calling in the middle of the night. It was my sister, calling not only to inform me about Grandma Mary's passing, but how she got the news.

The nursing home called Dad, as he's the first point of contact, and apparently when he answered the phone, he said something like "Hold on a second," and never came back to the phone. After trying to call several more times only to receive a busy signal, they called my sister, who is the second point of contact. Now, Dad has been going through another downturn, having spent the last few days not being able to eat and falling down a lot and his mother has been staying with him. So my sister calls me because she doesn't know what to do as she's taken a sleeping pill (it's now 2:00 in the morning her time) and can't drive half an hour to check on Dad. We're imagining the worse - maybe he got up to get his mother and fell down or worse. Clearly we need to see what's going on, so she called a cousin who lives around the corner but got no answer. Then she called the hospice nurse line, and they suggested she call the police. So the police head over there, greeted by a much confused Grandma and where they find that Dad had simply rolled over and gone back to sleep.

And I was so relieved that I burst out laughing when my sister told me.

Dad spent most of the day yesterday getting glucose mainlined into his system and, last I heard, undergoing more tests. This whole thing has been such a roller coaster ride that I can't even muster up the energy to be upset anymore. One week it seems he's going to live forever and the next it seems he may go at any moment. I'm just waiting for my people on the East Coast to wake up and tell me what happened next.

Today, for whatever reason, I'm feeling especially lonely. Normally I function quite well on my own; I've got plenty to keep me busy with my bookbinding and housework and messing about online. However, today I'm feeling keenly the absence of someone just to hang out with, when my closest friends live over an hour away and money is too tight to jump on a train. We're going to a wedding this weekend and I'm really looking forward to it, just being around people (even if I don't understand everything!).