G*Nice: Never skip on family time

After the craziness of last winter, with Europe under a deluge of snow and work just unrelenting, I finally got the chance in late Jan to go back to the UK for a visit. My primary reason for going back is, of course, to see my parents, now well into their 80s with differing degrees of ailments between them. My mum on the whole is as sprightly as a spring hare. She complains of tiredness every now and then, worries about diminishing sight in her left eye and a wobbly dodgy knee but with cajoling she can easily be distracted into feeling like a teenager again.

Within a day or so of my arrival, with the catering gene well and truly on overdrive, I managed to get her using Gmail video chat with my better half stuck in Dubai, where among other things we could both talk to Cookie the Dog. Not sure how Cookie felt about the video chats. She licked the screen a few times between tilting her head manically back and forth in confusion! You have to love the internet huh! For as much as it is the world's worst distraction when we should really be concentrating on other things or other people, it also can bring worlds together like no other thing that we have.

I also managed to break my mum's routine for at least one night because I took her to the theatre to see a flamboyant musical… Mamma Mia in fact, which was quite apt! So all things good on the mum front, but as ever, my biggest concern is with my poor old dad.

Over the years we have never been that close. Too much stiff upper lipness that we English are so known for mixed with the fact that we are just so different as people. Don't get me wrong, there is love and respect there but we have never found the words or the occasion to personally express it to each other. Life has cruelly dealt him a terrible hand of cards over the past 20 years with a litany of horrible illnesses, which have driven his spirits down to a level of desperation that has created a strange fission between us to reconnect before it's too late. But neither of us are emotionally equipped to do it in words so we are left hoping that emotional transference is taking place between us in the comfortable silences when we are in each others' company, or when we bond while watching old boxing videos together. The final cruel blow dealt to my old dad in all of this is that for the past couple of years he has slowly lost his hearing, so between his natural state and outright refusal to place any faith in the hearing aids he is prescribed, he just lives inside his head with his frustrations, depressions and pains.

I cannot imagine how awful this must be as it forces an even greater distance between him and the rest of us and the outside world. And for both of us in these critical years, the things we need to say just cannot be shouted out and definitely not shouted out and repeated at least three times until they register. Conversely, writing stuff down would just be too painful for me to do and maybe too much for my dad to read. So we just sit there in a desperate tranquillity making the best of the moments that modern life allows us to have together.

Thoughtfully-Yours
  G*Nice