The Long Goodbye.

I was early for the visit; the traffic had seemed lighter than usual. I parked in my usual spot in the shadow of the University’s halls of residence and walked to the cafe and sat at the end bar near the pizza oven and read my current book, The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth M. Stampp, a careful and detailed study of slavery in the ante-bellum South, published in 1956; and in which the author acknowledges that ‘… American Negroes still await the full fruition of their emancipation …’.

An hour later I left the café and walked rather quickly, as light rain was falling although it was not cold, through the university and across European-treed Royal Parade, elms still not in full leaf, to the hospital; and then in through the private hospital section’s entrance, along several corridors and around several corners, past radiology and a few other -ologies, and finally down a flight of steps into the main reception area. That knowledge of the labyrinthine building saved a few hundred metres of walking in rain. 

The lanyarded reception clerk directed me to nine west, and the nine west nurse directed me to bed nineteen. It had been lowered because she - my mother - had kept getting out. The doctors told me she had immense strength, but I knew that. Two nights earlier, when I had had a night away in Daylesford, the nurse visiting her home called me to say she had disappeared and had walked a round trip to Keilor Road. A couple of kilometres. Her next-to-last journey, it turned out. On foot and all!

She had been admitted the day before. Now she was asleep. No: she was awake, but dreaming, fitfully, semi-delirious. During the couple of hours I was there she talked a novella of several chapters and several plot twists and dialogue and descriptive passages and yet no ending. Delirious? She corrected me a couple of times on points of fact, when I spoke in the intervals. The nurse brought in a telephone, my sister on the line from deep South Gippsland, high on a hill where telephone reception would be best. They talked, and she was completely coherent, even cogent, like a beat poet suddenly writing an editorial.

She would not drink her tea; and every day she would drink twenty. But nothing else was much different from previous episodes, and she would be home in a couple of days. 

It was time to go, but I had to wait while the nurses ‘handed over’. I wandered back to the bed where she was apparently sleeping. I sat and waited and she kept suddenly sermonising. Then she opened her eyes. ‘The relations are here,’ she said, looking to the middle of the room. I told her I’d be back in the evening.

*

The rain was a mere drizzle when the call came through later. It had been peaceful, the doctor said. You never expect it, and when it happens, it creeps up on you. The clock had stopped at 96 years and five months.