On the topic of goodbye

 

My Nan always hated it when I went away.  Given I’ve spent most of my adult life in a different state (or country) to where she lived, sometimes we’d go a year or two between visits, and so she felt that each goodbye may well be the Very Last Goodbye.  Every time she hugged me when I was leaving, she would cry.  Every single time.

The first time I left Perth, on my way to Brasil for a 12 month exchange programme, my Nan made me promise that I wouldn’t come home early if something happened to her and Pa. She wanted me to stay and enjoy my exchange.  At the time, she was 66, Pa was a decade older.  I was pretty confident that they’d be ok, and I made the promise based on that.  As it turned out, my father, aged 46, was the one who got sick and required surgery to prevent him dying.  The surgery was successful.  I stayed in Brasil for the full year.

When I moved to Brisbane, Nan was just shy of 76, Pa was almost 86.  I still remember driving away from their house the last time I visited, a couple of days before I flew to Brisbane, the two of them standing on their driveway and waving until we turned the corner, Nan crying the whole time.

Every time we visited her (or she visited us), it was the same.  At the point of farewell, Nan would get upset and start to cry, then apologise for being “a silly old thing”.  Every time she would say something that indicated she was considering this to be the (potentially) final farewell.

Pa would get emotional, but he never seemed as worried as her that he’d never see me again.  Given he was ten years older and had several quite significant health issues (including the fact he’d technically died from the heart attack he’d had in his sixties) he was statistically more likely to die first, and we all knew it.

The very last time I saw Pa was on New Year’s Day, 2010.  I was nearly seven months pregnant with my eldest, and my husband and I had been back in WA visiting family for Christmas.  We stopped in to see Nan and Pa on the way to the airport.  Pa waved us off with a smile, promising to come visit when the baby was born.  Nan waved till we were out of sight, crying the whole time.

About a week later, Pa had a fall and they did a brain scan as a result.  They discovered he had numerous tumours in his brain; he declined all medical treatments except pain management.  He couldn’t hear well on the phone (he’d been mostly deaf for years), so I sent my mum emails that she read to him instead.  He insisted to the doctors that he needed to make it to mid-March because there was a great-grandbaby on the way.  He made it to the first of February.

His funeral was huge.  I know this, not because I went, but because my in-laws went.  I wanted to go, but both my mum and my Nan asked me not to come.  They were both concerned that flying back across the country at eight months pregnant wouldn’t be good for me or the baby (even though my obstetrician said I was fine to fly).  And so I stayed home.

Over the ten years that followed, there were multiple visits back and forth.  Nan accompanied my parents to our place several times; we went back to WA every year or so.  Nan’s last visit to Brisbane was in late 2015 to meet our son.  She was 89; he was 18 days old.  She always talked about visiting us again, but we all knew it was too long a flight for her anymore.  Instead, we saw her when we went back to Perth, the first time a year after her final visit to us, then for our son’s 2^nd birthday, when he sat on her lap while she sang him happy birthday.  She still got emotional at farewells, and it had grown to her getting teary on the phone when it was time to say goodbye.

Early last year, we flew to Perth for the first time in two years for a family wedding and my mum’s 70^th birthday.  Nan had been in hospital for an operation, but she was in pretty good form.  She loved seeing our kids, gave them lots of hugs and kisses, loved that we came to visit her house while she was convalescing.  And then she had a stroke.

The stroke happened while we were still in Perth, and I got to see her a few times afterwards.  I held her hand, stroked her hair from her forehead like she’d done for me when I was a child, and told her that I loved her.  Although it was sad, it was lovely to have that time with her, and to be there for my mum.

Nan died in April, and her funeral should have overflowed the room, like Pa’s did.  But she died at the height of COVID restrictions, so there were only ten people at her funeral.  I didn’t go to her funeral either – the restrictions left me stuck in Queensland, watching my Nan’s funeral via a livestream.

The irony of it all was that she was so badly affected by the stroke that the last time I saw her, she didn’t even know that I was in the room.  After all those years of tears and worry that this may be the last time she’d ever see me, my Nan was never even aware of that Final Goodbye.