Life has a funny way of knocking you sideways, just when you feel your feet have touched the ground, when you can just feel your toes curl against the hardness of the earth.
I have been getting there, little by little these past few months. Stepping gingerly down to feel for a ledge, a nook, a stop, anything to keep me from tumbling off the edge. Sometimes I can feel it, can feel a sense of solidity underneath my skin. Oftentimes, I feel as if nothing in the world can stop me from free falling so quickly my breath cannot catch up.
My father sounds weary. "It's your Nan," he says. His mother.
My colleague has had to pull me out of a meeting, "It's your father, he's at the hospital" she whispers.
I can sense her looking at me across the office. Maybe it is the sharp intake of my breath, or the way my right arm curls around, holding myself in, that makes her glance up.
"She is in the hospital, in Emergency. We are just waiting to hear." My grandmother, at 94, has always been a fighter. Yet there is now a frailty in her movements, her lined skin softer.
My father's strong voice, always so assured and calm, breaks just a little.
"We have also had some more bad news from home*."
Last week it is my uncle, my mother's eldest brother. He has been playing host to a tumour strangling his lungs which cannot be removed. If we are to come, the time is now.
Today is another beloved uncle. My father's doppelganger, the two of them with the same curly hair and bright smile. I said goodbye to him in a hospital bed 7 months ago after he suffered an aneurysm, yet held on against all odds. His body now riddled with cancer, my mother whispers that she will be there, in Wales with the Gorgeous, in a week. The reply is grim, sadly he, my uncle, may not.
I feel numb, methodically answer. Try to say focused through my meeting, and hold back tears. All I want, right now, is to release this sadness, even though I know in my heart that time and death are uncomfortable bedfellows, that they do not wait. That sometimes death comes for all the right reasons, and other times there is senselessness in it. That the time we have is so precious, and so fleeting.
And that I am lucky to have these memories of laughter at my uncle's tables, the sounds of their voices like lullabies telling stories, the kindness and love.
*Although both my sister and I were born in Canada, home has always referred to Cardiff where both my parents are from. For me, Wales will always be *home*
