Mama

Nick, my dad, mama and me in July 2011

I wasn't feeling so crash hot today and slept really badly last night so decided I needed a sick day from work. I slept most of the morning away and woke to a flurry of whatsapp messages on my phone from various members of my family and photos of my grandmother in a hospital bed. It seems that she had a heart attack and is bleeding in four places in the brain. She is in a coma and unlikely to recover, according to the doctors (and what I can piece together from all the family's messages), though my aunt believes she can still hear them talking to her.

I've been a bit dazed all afternoon, with updates popping up on my phone every so often. It's hard to know how to feel. I feel terribly sad for mama and sorry for the family all waiting in the hospital (my dad, aunt, uncle, cousins, with more family travelling in from Australia and the UK).

She is my last living grandparent. She has been a complicated and sometimes difficult person to get on with for as long as I've known her, but the family has always been loyal to her. She has had dementia for the last few years and the last time I saw her (last year) she had no idea who I was. She has been in full time care for the last little while after a fall at home when she broke her hip (I only found out about that last week).

It feels weird that I was so close by last week when I was in Singapore, yet didn't go to KL to see her. Yet the last time I saw her was so sad. Gin said not to fret about not having visited because she wouldn't have recognised me and it would have just tainted my memory of her, which is right. But it still feels odd.