Yesterday was certainly the blackest day in my life for a very long time, for years in fact. With nothing bad concretely happening but all of the nagging depression and tiredness I’ve been experiencing lately peaking sharply and somewhat unexpectedly. I took a day off from work to visit my grandmother in a hospital in my hometown. She’s 81 years old and has been, quite astonishingly, living on her own until only very recently when her memory has started to perform nasty tricks on her. Now she’s being treated for early stages of dementia and her condition keeps wavering to and fro. Sometimes she recognises no-one and the things she speaks of are very unsettling. I’ve been putting off visiting her, probably because I’ve been wanting to ignore her sickness and the effect it has had on her, but since she’s been asking why I haven’t visited and since the doctors said her passing is only a matter of days I had no other option than to go.

Luckily her condition has improved a little since the “only a few days left”- sentence was delivered. When I entered, she was sitting in a hallway, tormenting the nurses with a colourful recital of the dream she had had last night. This recital wasn’t lacking in volume in deliverance because she’s almost deaf and her hearing aid keeps malfunctioning. This recital wasn’t lacking in digressive bypaths and sudden changes of subject either. Which was kind of heartwarming and encouraging because that’s the way I’ve come to know and want to remember her. She recognised me and seemed very pleased with me being there. I kneeled beside her, put my head on her lap and wept bitterly because she looked so frail and her voice had lost so much of its’ previous timbre and strenght. She stroked my hair and told me everything will be fine again once she gets better and gets back to her home. This only made me weep more.

I spent an hour in her company and thought it better to leave when she started getting sleepy and mistaking me first for my brother and then for a doctor. Upon leaving I had a very strong premonition that this was the last time I saw her alive. This is the woman who practically raised me since my mother was working a lot. We lived in a big house, my parents and my brother, my mothers’ parents and my grandfathers’ mother. So there was never a problem with finding someone to look after the kids. I guess I had a good and healthy childhood because I can’t remember anything of it. I was loved and cared for and of the four cousins I was the eldest and grandmothers’ favourite one. She was already retired from work when I was a kid so she had a lot of time for me and my brother. Unfortunately she divorced my grandfather when I was eight years old and moved away. That was probably the end of a magical childhood for me but she didn’t move very far and we continued to be on close terms all the way until puberty entered the picture and started whispering all kinds of things in my ear, about independence and growing up. I moved to Helsinki and lately have been seeing her a few times a year.

Now her time seems to be up and I’m taking this even harder than I thought I would.