It's 2:27am on Sunday morning, although I think the date and time presented in this blog are a day behind. Anyway, I had a sad day yesterday. I received some messages from Nanny's granddaughter, Rebecca, saying that Nanny had been taken to the hospital. Then, Nanny's daughter told me which ward and room number she was in. I went to see her as soon as I found out, and she was very confused; in some ways, she seemed resigned to death.
Late on Friday night, she was taken to the Emergency Room at Calvary Hospital on Angas Street because she was bleeding from the mouth and was disoriented. Rebecca told me the doctors said it is highly likely she has stomach cancer, but they can't do a biopsy because of her age. Even if they did detect it, they couldn’t treat it also due to her age. Apparently, yesterday morning, before I arrived, she was throwing things around and asking for her daughter.
When I got there, no one else was around, and she seemed very happy to see me. But she started talking about wanting to take English classes because she felt she couldn't speak English and asked if I knew anywhere she could go. I said, "Nanny, you speak perfect English," but she just shook her head and said, "Come on." There was some mention that dementia might be setting in, and if it is, it’s happening very quickly.
Dad had basic symptoms of dementia for years, but then one day, he was out the back near the pool, he slipped, and hit his head on the concrete. From that day on, the dementia accelerated very quickly. I've thought a lot about whether it's better to have dementia as a significantly older person. I watched my dad, who was 95, have no clue that he was near the end of his life. You could try to have a conversation with him, but he would forget that he even opened his mouth literally ten seconds later. It was so difficult for all of us, but for him, he was carefree and totally unaware that he was going to die soon. He was also not in any pain.
I compare this with Nanny, who is beyond miserable. A big part of her decline is that she lost her son to cancer earlier this year, and she was distraught about it. She has never been the same since, and now she has lost her son, her house, her independence, her social life at the church, and her connections within the Lithuanian community. She’s lost everything, and she is very aware of it. So when I go to see her at the nursing home and she cries, I really just sit with her because, although I can't fully empathise, I can see that this God she believes in really is a cruel and merciless bastard.
So, I want to tell you a secret: if Nanny is developing dementia, I secretly hope it progresses quickly so that she becomes unaware of the fact that she doesn’t have long to live, and that she is comfortable and peaceful. It’s sort of like the Neuralysers they use in Men In Black, which completely erase your short-term memory. Below, you can see the sign out front of Calvary Hospital as well as the Emergency Department.
On the way out tonight, I came across a small statue of the Venerable Mary Potter, which you can see below. I was familiar with Mary Potter because there is a hospice in Adelaide named after her, but I did not know she was on her way to sainthood. She was a British woman who did significant work in Australia, establishing healthcare facilities and hospitals.
I think about these nuns, and in some ways, I feel quite similar to them because they are all celibate. While I do believe in the contents of the first and second Testaments of the Bible, I don't support it, which makes me a dystheist. But I can relate to nuns, particularly in the absence of a man and the feeling of having a higher purpose. I don't mean that I am destined to do great things, but I do feel that I have the potential to achieve things quietly, slipping under the radar while doing so.
Someone like the Venerable Mary Potter will live forever through her name in places like her hospice here in Adelaide, and I'm sure there are healthcare settings named after her around the world. What will truly solidify her immortality will be when she is canonised as a saint. I wonder if she'll become a saint before the millennial saint Carlo Acutis. I also want to know if he is a Venerable too until he gets canonised.
I feel like I am the total opposite of these saintly people because I am a sinner. Not in a funny, jovial way, but I have genuinely sinned, and I doubt I'll ever be able to redeem myself.
I'm feeling very sad tonight, but I'm also overwhelmed with profound guilt. Nanny literally raised my brother and me, but in addition to being our "Nanny," she was also our cleaning lady. She washed our clothes, vacuumed our floors, cleaned our bathrooms, and even scrubbed the toilets. It's confusing and hard to reconcile what really happened here.
I love my mum, but she did leave me at Nanny's when I was only a couple of weeks old, and that set a pattern for the rest of both my and my brother's childhood. I'm not complaining because I love Nanny and she had a caretaker role, but she also had a role where she was doing things like cleaning our toilets and making our beds.
It was like a clash of classes. Nanny came from a working-class background and was very frugal, so she would take us to places like Cheap As Chips to buy school supplies. On the other hand, Mum, who had a lot of money, would take us to David Jones and other upscale places to buy clothes. Nanny always told Mum that she worked too much and needed to spend more time with us, but Mum was addicted to her line of work. I don't begrudge her that—I believe everyone should reach their full potential.
As well as being very working-class, Nanny is Catholic, and she would say little things to us like, "Don't whistle inside, you'll whistle the devil in," which scared the shit out of me. Another time, she told me about how the Virgin Mary turned the sun around, and it terrified me so much that I actually threw up. But these little religious interventions sparked a lifelong curiosity about religion in me. Nanny was always upset that Mum didn’t have us baptised. In my early twenties, I talked to Dad about getting baptised, but he told me it would be an act of self-promotion, so I decided against it.
Nanny only stopped working for us just after her 90th birthday. She did my washing up until then. I usually did my own laundry, but I always saved some for her because I still wanted her to come. I don't know a world without Nanny. I remember when I was a kid, I used to fight with Mum a lot, and I once told her I wanted to go live with Nanny. Looking back, I can now see how much that must have hurt my Mum, but at the time, it felt like Nanny was our primary caregiver.
Her family doesn't like Ben and me much. While I have a good relationship with them, especially Rebecca, I know they didn’t like the work Nanny did for us. I feel so guilty that someone’s life revolved around our lives. When Nanny stopped nannying us, she used to just come to clean. She came twice a week to our old house, but when that became too much for her, Mum hired two other cleaners—a couple that worked as a team and they came one day a week. When Nanny came on the other day she would ask me about them and go through our house, looking at the work they had done. I felt so bad that this was her job, her workplace. Our home was her workplace.
As I got older, Nanny and I used to sit together at her house and watch TV every Saturday night. But the thing is, we were not equals. She may have scrubbed our toilets, but she is the matriarch of a large family. She is a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, and all those lives exist and thrive because of her. She was a valuable and respected member of her church and the Lithuanian community, and frankly, she is more of a woman and has made more of a difference in this world than I ever will.
After I got back from the hospital, Mum and I went to see a singer, Rebecca O'Connor, as Tina Turner in a show called Simply the Best at the Regal Theatre. I wasn’t in the mood for it tonight. As I sat there, I found myself thinking: Rebecca O'Connor has the most powerful voice and electric presence on stage. Does she really want to spend her whole life singing someone else's songs? Does she really want to spend her life pretending to be someone else? She should get her own band and be her own act—she's too good for this. Below, you can see photos of Rebecca with her band and her dancers onstage. I also took a photo from the staircase as we were leaving.
