Today I took a day off and once again attended the Royal Melbourne Show with E. We had a most excellent time, and were fortunate enough to witness a good half-hour of the domestic-dog-trials, and even to get some video. (spaniel border collie apologies for the odd format and low res)
After the show, E took me to a familial duty long overdue: a trip to visit my grandmother in her nursing home. It was pretty scary for me: she has always been fiercely independent, and sufficiently cunning and devious that there was always some clear yardstick by which I could tell that she was still basically all there, however her body might have been falling apart. The deterioration has been sudden however… I don’t think she knew who I was, and in the course of fifteen minutes conversation she explicitly gave the current date as three distinct (and different) times, all before my birth. She recognised E though, as that lovely girl from Ballarat. At one point I think she mistook me for my father, which was weird.
The whole event left me feeling sad and horrified for her, but also chilled with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that one day all that I am now will fade and be utterly erased throws the significance of the time I have into sharp relief.