Whatever He Says

By Belinda I arrived in England for a four week stay, late on a cold January evening in 2004. After a 25 hour long journey, due to closed airports in England, when I finally got to Mum's empty house in Alvechurch, I slept deeply and woke up the next morning feeling well rested and refreshed. Rob had to go to work, and I spent the day quietly, waiting impatiently for him to come home so that we could go to the hospital together. It felt like I had waited so long through the months since October and her stroke, and  I just couldn't wait any longer to see her. Night falls early in the winter in England and  we arrived at the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch in the dark. A sense of deja vu flowed over me. A year ago to the month, I had made many visits to this very hospital as Dad lay dying of pneumonia. The beeping of life support machinery; the very hallways I had walked at that time; and the smell of the place, all were part of my memories of "then." I had alrea...

By Belinda And so it came to pass that a year that contained more than its fair share of losses ended, and new year began: 2004.  On the 28th day of January, I boarded a plane for England, hardly able to believe that at last I would be seeing Mum. I couldn't get a direct flight to Birmingham so I flew via  Charles De Gaulle Airport  in Paris. When the flight landed in France however, we were told that there were no flights leaving for England; a snowfall had caused chaos on the roads and the airports were closed. Passengers were given meal coupons for an airport lounge. There was nothing to do but wait. If I have a book to read and journal to write in I will be content for hours and so the eleven hours until England pulled itself together and cleared away the snow felt like a kind of comfortable limbo. I wasn't in a hurry, I realized, now that I was on my way. Maybe I was a little scared. I had said goodbye to Mum when she boarded the plane for England in Octobe...

By Belinda Late on the night of Mum's sudden return to the hospital, Rob called me with good news. He had arrived half expecting her to be still waiting to be seen, just as I had worried, but instead he found her settled into bed, wearing a warm, pink and yellow nightie, with a cream blanket tucked up around her. She was comfortable, and said that she felt "at home," and was laughing and happy. Such a relief. Mum spent a week in the hospital and then was brought home again on December 10th to the house on Snake Lane. Rob found this time that she was not quite herself, and seemed depressed. Feeling so very far away, our lives went on, caught up with the gathering intensity of Christmas activities. The evening of December 10th, Paul and I went to the community carol service at our church. I burst into tears i n the middle of, Oh Holy Night . The thought of Mum and Rob struggling along in Alvechurch and of Mum in the cold empty house, and sad; was just too much of a ...

By Belinda A brief pause in the story of our own past harrowing family journey... One fact not often mentioned about Baby Boomers; my generation; is that we grew up with the shock waves of a war we never knew. I've written about some of those shock waves at various times here, but I've never mentioned the sound of sirens and the effect they had on Mum. A factory siren sounding the end of a work day, would take her back in a second to the terror of the bombing of Rotterdam. While her street survived, her city was all but demolished on May 14th 1940 during the German invasion of Holland. Second hand, we grew up knowing the terror of war. Today, listening to updates on the news of the bombing in Gaza and the rockets firing into Israel, I was thinking of a friend in Tel Aviv, a woman I came to know through my friend  Dave's blog , and whom I tried to meet up with last year in Israel. We didn't manage to connect face to face due to timing, but we connect occasionally...

By Belinda  Just as our household was stirring awake on a cold winter morning, t he phone rang downstairs . It was 7.00 a.m. on Tuesday the 2nd of December, 2003, 8 days after Mum had come back home from hospital. I heard Rob's voice on the other end of the phone line; he usually called at night to give updates on Mum--I knew this couldn't be good news. He told me that Mum was on her way to hospital in an ambulance. As he recounted the circumstances, they broke my heart.   The house that Mum and Dad had shared in Snake Lane for their last years together after moving from Bear Hill, was old and very basic. I would guess that it had been built at least 80 years earlier.  When I visited them in the month of October for the years they were there, I would sleep under layers of blankets because it was so cold. If it was -3 outside, it was not much warmer inside, and I remember once, writing on a postcard to family back in Canada that I felt as though I was sleeping ou...

By Belinda Almost four weeks post-stroke, when  my nephew Tim visited  Mum in the hospital, she greeted him by saying, "Hello darling."  Tim said to his dad, Rob, afterwards, that it was the first thing that Omie had really said to him  since she had been ill. Two simple words suddenly meant so much. They were reported across continents, recorded in my journal, and had the import of the words of the most famous celebrity.  I could think of no better choice for the blessing of Mum's first "darling" than Tim. Mum meant so much to Rob's two sons, Tim and John. She was loved by everyone, but to them she had been a constant source of stability, love and security over some difficult years. Exactly four weeks after her stroke, Mum went for a short "home visit" to the empty house on Snake Lane. An occupational therapist went along to make an assessment of the accommodations necessary for her return. She was able to turn on the gas stove, but had...

By Belinda We all know on some level in our heads that life as we know it can change in an instant, but we act as though we ourselves, and those we love are invincible--and we choose to believe it.  We don't really believe that our parents will ever grow old, or become vulnerable--or dependent. They were the ones who were so big and strong in our eyes as children and they were supposed to look after us. I remember the shock when I first noticed my parents aging and realized that they whom I had needed, needed me.  And now, as relentlessly as the increasingly chill winds of oncoming winter gradually stripped bare the trees of their golden leafed glory, what only happened to other people was happening to us. One October evening in 2003, just after Mum's stroke, I was playing Beatles music in my kitchen while cooking a stir fry, and the music reminded me vividly of our last years together as a family in the 1960's. I found myself mourning the loss of both of my paren...